About Me

I live in North Wales in the UK and build mainly 1/35 scale Axis AFV’s

 

I built my first model kit as a youngster in the mid 1970's. A local shop stocked Matchbox kits, and I built many 1/76 scale aircraft before moving on to their armour kits. Soon I discovered a local hobby shop with a far bigger selection, and I started building whatever genre took my fancy. The hobby didn't get a look in during my teenage years, as we all know there were far more important matters to attend to!

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Forward some 35 years to 2010 and I found, like myself as a child, my young son loved building LEGO. We also built the occasional kit together. This slowly piqued my interest in the hobby again and I started buying the odd scale model magazine. I lurked about on various online modelling forums to see how the hobby had evolved and what products seemed to be getting the most attention. Whilst most of the modelling community has slowly migrated from individual forums to most of the busiest social media platforms, both sources continue to provide an invaluable contribution and source of inspiration.

I had always retained an historical military interest and particularly with the Normandy campaign that my grandad had taken part in, so it was no surprise that I was attracted to fighting vehicles that had taken part. I have purchased and built many of them over the years, nearly all of them in 1/35 scale. With the victors of that past conflict capturing the spoils of war in great detail and having dedicated publications like the Panzerwrecks series devoted to documenting the carnage left behind, I find myself now creating more and more vignettes with damaged, wrecked and abandoned vehicles.

3cm M.K. 103 Zwilling Flakpanzer IV "Kugelblitz"

Cyber-Hobby's re-released Panzer IV Flakpanzer Kugelblitz

Although very few photographs survive of this prototype it still makes into a very pleasing model. A review can be found below

http://www.missing-lynx.com/reviews/german/dml9109reviewcs_1.html

Finished with the Vallejo Dunkengelb modulation set, Abteilung oils and Mig pigments, I completed this in 2014

 

My model making journey starts (2010)

It's late 2010. After starting the Tamiya Steyr kit I found a bunch of old modelling stuff at my parents. These included some quite well preserved figures, paints, and even the old but battered 1970's Tamiya Tiger I. What surprised me most of all though was that some of the Tamiya paint's were still usable!

I figured the Tiger I would be a great guinea pig so I set about trying out some of the latest techniques I had read about. One thing that I picked up early on is that the large Tamiya spray tins are not really suitable for 1/35 scale kits, and I would have to get my hands on an airbrush. I did some research and soon acquired an Iwata HP-C-Plus and compressor.

The Panzerwreck books really appealed to me so from the very start I was attempting to convey some wrecks. Scratchmod's site was a great inspiration and I soon set about destroying brand new but very cheap kit's, in my attempt to display wrecked vehicles.