2022

On the last day of the year it is time for a short look back on what was my 2022.

The thing that has cast a shadow over the whole year is the incredibly useless war in Ukraine. It worries me, I don’t know what that brain-cancer suffering selfish fuckwit in the Kremlin’s next step will be and I don’t like to see this meaningless conflict stretched another year. I hate all the disinformation Russia has spread over the world, I don’t want to witness the detonation of another atomic bomb. I hope Ukraine keeps standing tall, I hope NATO will keep supporting Ukraine with everything they have, I hope Russia will crumble and degenerate into a crippled and poverty stricken country with nothing left to threaten the world with for the coming centuries. I hope Putin dies soon. Slava Ukraini.

This decade is the worst I have experienced since the eighties. I don’t like what is happening around us. There is no sense of freshness, no feeling of a new dawning, like we are on the brink of new discoveries, there is a lack of unity, a sense of a bond between the peoples. Only unnecessary dissension, confusion and disarray. Money isn’t everything. Being a millionaire or a billionaire should be illegal. There is nothing wrong with having a little extra money as long as you pay your taxes. Having enough to be able to buy Africa as a whole and not paying taxes is. Money should be shared. No one should have to sleep on the street while two blocks down someone is able to bathe in hundred dollar bills. It often makes me conclude the world would really be better off without human beings messing everything up. You might conclude I am a bit of a dark person and maybe you're right. But I think I have all the right to be. After 52 years of living I think I have seen enough to come to these conclusions. And deep inside I still am a happy little fellow trying to think positive thoughts.

So. Let’s talk about my list of good things of 2022. It seems I got myself a steady job after more than twenty years of being a free-lancer. I still have time to be film maker but I do not have to worry about whether or not I will have food on the table next month. That’s good. I still am with the same woman I already love for over twenty years. That’s awesome. I made a couple of nice paper models. I started reading books again. My cats still are alive and healthy. I have friends, in real life and online. I still have a mother. I can enjoy the little (and bigger) things in life that make it all worthwhile: food. Music. Panel shows. Walks in the park. Family. Friends. A rocket launch. A rocket landing. New boots. A new pair of trousers. A new coat. A silly cartoon. Reading bedtime stories to my girlfriend and making her laugh.

I have no new year’s resolutions because I am convinced that if you want to change something, be it yourself or the world, you shouldn’t wait until a new year begins,  you should take action right away. I just hope 2023 will be better than 2022.
My wishes for 2023 are plain and simple. Peace. Love. Freedom. Happiness. Equality. Tolerance. Climate change awareness. It shouldn’t be that hard to reach those goals. Maybe I should wish for some kind of revolution. A kind of turnaround in consciousness about who we are, what we do and how we should live together on this little planet, which is the only place we can live now. We still have no other place to go. I wish you all a really good and prosperous 2023 with peace of mind and world peace.

Take heart.
—PK

Rant.

I wrote the text below this paragraph somewhere in August last year. When I had trouble with my printer. I needed to vent. I never published it because I thought it sounded a little too aggressive. Tonight, I again had beef with the machine.
I couldn't take it any longer.
I actually beat it so hard that I destroyed it.

 

I hate printers.

I love paper modelling. The problem is that this hobby depends for a great deal on printed material. And that is when I get dark. Really dark.
I absolutely loathe printers. I detest them. I hate them, I wish them all to hell. Canon, Brother, HP, Lexmark, other brands, I don’t care. Screw them all.

Printers are one of the epitomes of capitalism. Opposite from computers and lots of other electronics, printers never were meant to be reliable. Printers have the cheapest electronics, the flimsiest sensors, the lousiest plastics. Their designers must belong to the lowest scum on earth. Creating practically worthless pieces of junk just like themselves, mainly built to irate you.

BEEP. YOU HAVE A PAPER JAM. No, impossible. There isn’t any paper even near the printer. YOU. HAVE. A. PAPER. JAM. REMOVE THE TRAY. OPEN THE SCANNER LID. OPEN THE BACKDOOR. CLOSE THEM. PRESS OK.
There, I did it. Opened, closed, opened closed, You see? I said there is no paper j- BEEP. YOU HAVE A PAPER JAM. REMOVE THE TRAY. OPEN THE SCANNER LID. OPEN THE BACKDOOR. CLOSE THEM. PRESS OK. There isn’t any pa- BEEP. YOU HAVE A PAPER JAM.

They are made to get you to your boiling point. And make you go broke with consuming printer ink.
Because printer ink, which is - and I have told that a lot of times already - more expensive than blood, is the main reason printers mess your prints up. manufacturers do not give a damn about your printer. That hulk of cheap plastic and lousy micro-electronics doesn’t bother them at all. It is all about the ink. That is where the money is.

Manufacturers don’t care about your delicate prints. They want you to buy more ink. They put chips on their ink cartridges to ring an alarm bell when it’s “empty”. That usually means you can easily print a hundred or more page- NO,THE CARTRIDGE IS EMPTY. But, there still is about ten litres of ink in it. NO. IT IS EMPTY. BUY NEW ONES. But it is yellow that is “empty”. I just want to print some text. NO. YOU. CANNOT. PRINT. BLACK. WITHOUT. ALL. OF. THE. OTHER. COLOURS.
**** you, you ****ing ****, you ****ing can. You just ****ing won’t. You inaccessible brainless untweakable miserable piece of ****ing junk.

How many times I have been on the verge of taking the printer and throw it out of my three story high window onto the street. I don’t know what kept me from doing it. Oh yes. Littering, fines, and because I usually am a good law-abiding civilian. But sometimes. Sometimes.

I still can remember the time when household machineries were built to last a lifetime. Or at least were fool proof, repairable, accessible and  replacement parts were more or less universal.  If your vacuum cleaner broke down, all you needed was a screwdriver and some spare parts from the shop around the corner. Now those shops are gone and replaced by Amazon and ebay and the household equipment is disposed of when the light in the on-off switch has died, causing the complete machine to stop working and turn into a piece of junk.
Why cant they build a decent printer, which gives great prints, is sensitive and precise but also won’t give a 'I AM MISSING MY PAPER TRAY' or 'PAPER JAM' -error every time my upstairs neighbour is doing his girlfriend of the week? Why is printer ink so ridiculously expensive? I hope that the executives who thought that up will have to pay a hundredfold for a blood transfusion when they ever need one.

I hate printers. I absolutely hate printers.
And there is no exception to the rule. All printers are evil.

PS. Oh yeah. The paper jam. Wonder how I solved it? Online, after some searching I finally read something about a super slight misalignment of the moving guides in the paper tray that can cause the printer (a Brother in my case) to believe some paper is jammed. The. Paper. Tray. Guides. Have you ever? No debris, no shreds, no snippets in the print head’s lefty-righty-movey-to-and-fro-machinery, no, the paper tray guides. Took the tray out while Printer still gave paper error alarm, fiddled a little with the green guides, fiddle fiddle fiddle, put it back, alarm gone. You ****ing ****.

 

This time, I also tried. I fiddled with the paper tray guides. I really did. I didn't want to destroy it. ... Oh who am I kidding. I did want to destroy the f****r. I was so furious. It deserved to be destroyed. I had it for about six years so it was written off anyway. Now the quest for a new one will begin...

Shark.

The Shark submarine from Tintin's "Red Rackham's Treasure" is just as iconic as the red-and-white chequered rocket. The latter is unavailable, the shark sub isn't. It's here somewhere. It's not mine. Scroll and find it. For as long as the files stay up.

This is what I recently made of it, the trestles are of my own design. There is the option of a transparent cockpit and interior available in the kit but I chose to keep it simple this time. The fit is very good, I suggest you cut off the glue tabs and make glue strips yourself to keep the lines as clear as possible. I used clear gloss varnish on the canopy. Someone once wrote "In Hergé's universe nothing is shiny". That might very well be but I am not a supporter of that quote. Canopies are shiny. Rackham's treasure was shiny. I just think Hergé wanted to keep the drawings clean and clear. Nothing to do whether stuff was shiny or not. The Shark, well, it might have been very shiny all over. Maybe even Tintin's little quiff was shiny, full of hairspray lacquer. Maybe Haddock had a shiny nose. Who knows.

Up next will be something cold and far away in space.
Stay tuned.

--PK

a Little Exposition in a Library

If you happen to come in the vicinity of Uithuizen, a village in the north of Groningen next month, I recommend you take a look in the local library, where from this afternoon up til 31 december a selection of my paper models will be shown.

I have put some thought in which models I would like to show and what to tell about them. I decided upon this selection after I measured the showcase in which I had to display the models. That meant no vertically positioned models. I had to make a special little stand for the Shuttle stack and I unfortunately had to leave the Tintin rocket at home. Maybe next time!

For now, let's see what people will say about them. Next to the showcase I stuck a little text to the wall on why paper models are such fun to make.

At home, carefully putting models in a plastic crate. Little scary. Stuff is a little fragile.

Safely in the showcase in Uithuizen library.

F-1 engine on transport trolley and Saturn V staging.
All models got a little card explaining what it is and in what scale.

Thunderchild vs the Martian fighting machines

Crevasse and dual splashdown diorama

Shuttle Endeavour and stack horizontally on a stand.

Groningen "Hoofdstation"  and T-38 with an example of an uncut model sheet.

A nice little birthday present to myself, since I became 52 yesterday. Pff. Time flies when you are busy. (-: Let's hope people like what they see.

Heldere hemel, Lodewijk - and: Clear skies, Jim.

This week we have to deal with the passing of two astronauts. The first Dutch-born man in space Lodewijk van den Berg and James McDivitt, both over 90 years old. Respectable ages, if you ask me.

   

Left: Lodewijk van den Berg, Right: James McDivitt. Both pictures: Wikimedia.

Lodewijk van den Berg was born in Sluiskil and emigrated to the US for his study and his work thereafter. His job got a secretive character and he had to become an American citizen to continue what he did. NASA asked him to do his job on board of a spaceshuttle, because no one else knew as much as he did about his line of work. So he became payload specialist and flew on board of Challenger, in the same year Wubbo Ockels would fly, in the same spacecraft. But although Lodewijk was first, Wubbo was the first Dutch astronaut. Lodewijk kept on visiting his birthplace almost every year. He was 90 years old when he passed on.

Korea veteran pilot James McDivitt was one of the second class of astronauts, the New Nine. His first flight was Gemini 4, with Ed White. He commanded the spacecraft and Ed White made the forst U.S. spacewalk. McDivitt later also commanded the Apollo 9 mission that successfully tested the Lunar Lander in Earth orbit. He stayed at NASA as Apollo program manager up til 1972. he was 93.

Fokker S.14 - and a whiffy followed.

I do not want to write a lot about this build itself. The original Paper Trade model has a really bad fit, in my opinion. All pages were printed at the exact same scale but the hull parts differ widely in cross section and are too big one time, too small the next time. The canopy is too small in general and it needed to be enlarged at 102% to become even close to fitting. I redid the model twice. And I almost called it quits.

But the plane was too nice to quit. Look at it. Those straicht stubby wings. That wide canopy. And unique in that it was the first jet trainer not derived from an already exisiting fighter jet. Fokker still had their firsts in those years.

The plane itself was a little hard to sell abroad and the Dutch airforce only bought 21. Demonstrations abroad didn't cause the sales to rise and so it stayed with just those 21 planes.

While building I pondered about the slightly euphemistic name the S.14 got. Machtrainer. And how the plane with those wings never ever could get close to any mach number in general. (781 Km/h) While the Dutch Airforce still used Gloster Meteors and were considering buying Republic Thunderjets with Marshall-plan money, this almost obsolete looking jet trainer was presented on paper in 1949 and for real in 1951. It had the same type of engine as the Meteor and was a sturdy looking thing. But still nowhere near anything Mach-y.

So I thought it would be nice to see how this stove pipe would look with swept wings. I took the wings, empennage and canopy of an F-86 of TSMC and fiddled with the shapes, colours and roundels. I also liked the livery of the prototype S.14, callsign K-1, and recoloured the original model in that livery.

The bad fit was still there but now I knew it and I just worked my way around it. This was just a fun try anyway. Amazingly, the wings not only suited the plane well but they fitted like a glove. I lengthened the Sabre-tail a little with the yellow part of the original tail. I closed the nose wheel well. A skewer was used as a pedestal and a small upside down peanut dish as the plinth.

It looked faster than the original S.14. But the longer I looked at is, the more generic the plane became. It looks exactly the same as The MiG-15, The Ouragan, the Mystere, the F-86, the F-84, the Pulqui, you name them. It immediately lost the charm it had as the straight winged plane it was. Hahaha! So in the end, I prefer the original model. But I still think it was a bad fitting model.

Well, so far for this grumpily built inbetweenie. Next time we speak you will see something space related again.

Greetings, Slava Ukraini and stay safe, people.

--PK

STS-61A: Challenger's last full flight

 
I haven’t built in 1/400 in a long time. For more reasons than one. The main reason was I thought it had become too small for my eyes to handle. But I still had some unfinished business in that scale. My plan was to build all shuttles in 1/400, each on a milestone mission. I did Enterprise (ALT), Columbia (STS-1), Atlantis (First docking to Mir) and Endeavour (its last ISS mission with most spacecraft attached to the station).
But I still had to do at least two more. I wanted to show Discovery, the workhorse of the fleet, while deploying the Hubble Space Telescope. And Challenger. Which will be this build.

When Challenger lifted off from LC39A the 30th October of 1985, it was another milestone in the Shuttle program in many ways. With eight people on board, it was the largest ever crew launched in a single spacecraft. It also was the launch of the first Dutch astronaut, Wubbo Ockels. And it was the last time Shuttle Challenger made a full flight from launch to wheel stop, at Edwards AFB on November 6. On the next occasion, 26 February 1986 and well, we all know what happened, I don’t have to elaborate on that…
More story and many more photos after the jump:

Could-have-been-Stuka: The Blohm und Voss Ha-137

 Hi there! Another airplane it is. Unbelievable. Five models in one month. Wahey!

Blohm und Voss were later on in the National Socialist period quite well known for their flying boats but they started out when they purchased the Hamburger Flugzeugbau (the Ha- part in the name of the plane). Uninvited but nevertheless with the "best" intentions, they entered the competition in the mid-thirties to build Germany's new dive bomber. The Ha-137 was competing against and eventually lost out to the equally archaic looking Ju-87. Both sported inversed gullwings to keep the non-retractable landing gear short. And there the comparison stops. The Ju-87 had room for two, the Ha-137 carried just the pilot. The Ju-87 was large, the Ha-137 looked more like a fighter, albeit with an open cockpit, something the Ju-87 didn't have. Anyway, bla bla bla. Ju-87 won, Jericho trumpet, bla bla bla, obsolete, bla bla bla, Allies won.
But the Ha-137 looked to me like a nice little plane to build. But to me it looked better without the nazi-parafernalia on its hull and wings. So I removed all lettering and emblems.
The very nicely designed model is created by Der Kampfflieger, Roman Vasiliev, from Ukraine. The parts fit very well. I built it 1/72 and that's smaller than originally intended.

It received a spinning propeller and well, it was an easy and straightforward build. And that's pretty much it, actually.

I already am working on the preparations for the next model. It will be very small, and - finally -  something space-related again.

Savoia-Marchetti S.79 Sparviero (Prototype)

Long before I went on vacation, this Zio aircraft was waiting for me for a long time already. I had it printed out in the stash as a quickie for a rainy day or holidays.

It was a bit more elaborate plane and I had started work on the fuselage in the end of june. But from the beginning, I slowly grew to dislike the amount of guns protruding from the hull.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have built a lot of war planes before but this one has all its guns so… well, obviously displayed. And with all that war in Ukraine going on, it just felt not right. It was just too much... well... in your face for my taste.
But I kept building anyway. The fuselage was made and I liked its shape. The weird hump and the curves are quite unique and I liked the overall shape. On holiday, I worked a bit on the mid-engine before changing moods and working on the Johan Scherft Bee-eaters, a Zio Spitfire and the VFW 614.

Three models. In two weeks.

On the last day of my short two-week vacation I can say that I actually have made three models. So far for thinking I am not inspired or not motivated any more.
I won’t bother you with build reports (I haven’t made them anyway) but I will show you the end result.
First I built the Bee-eaters trio of Johan Scherft.  It’s the (African) dwarf-bee-eater, so it actually is full-scale.  I found a nice twig at the compost heap in the garden they could sit on and the only things I added myself were the 3D-feet (rolled and coloured paper) and a three-part blob of transparent glossy acrylic paint for the eyes. It makes the model so much more come to life. It will be left as a present to the people whose house we are house-sitting.

The second one was a relative quickie and a favourite of mine, Zio’s Spitfire. This one also will be left in the house. As always, Fabrizio Prudenziati’s model is an utter joy to build. The fit is great and the result always makes me smile. The propeller on this build already spins when just walking with it. A sigh makes it move.

The third build was this German curiosity, the VFW 614. A cooperation between several joined Greman aircraft manufacturers and the Dutch Fokker company. The small commuter plane had its engines on top of the wing. An idea which nowadays has regained momentum since it significantly reduces engine noise. A straight forward build without any difficulties. The model has no landing gear so it is placed on a pedestal. It is by no means perfect but it was a nice build and I might do it again some day. This one is going back with me.

Tomorrow it’s back to work again. And I actually am looking forward to it. Weird, eh?

Stay safe and healthy, take good care.

—PK

It's getting almost too regular: I'm still here.

 Hi there.

I felt kind of obliged to do an update.
Of course, I am still here. It's just that I started a new day job to provide some income so I am quite occupied by that at the moment.

I still am a filmmaker by profession. That is something I will always be. But nowadays it has become really hard to make a living out of making films. About 5 years ago it still was possible. We were stuggling then too, but we managed. After that, the pond dried out, hard to catch any fisn in it.

In those times of scarcity, I had an an amazing stroke of luck and got a freelance job in the regional archives, describing and working with archival films, lots of them from before the second world war. I learned a lot about archival work and since history always was one of my interests, I really wanted to make the freelance job a steadier one. One that I could do to provide me with a steadier income ans still being able to make films. Unfortunately, that job wasn't possible at the regional archives in my province.

A little more than a month or so ago I applied for a comparable, but much more extensive job at the regional archives in the neighbouring province and... I got accepted!

So, since a week or two now, I am managing the film and video archives in the regional archives in the province of Drenthe. There is so much to learn and to do. Due to illness of my predecessor, the collection was more or less neglected for more than two years. There is a considerable backlog to be dealt with and we also have to move the archive itself to another place in the depot. A big task and I really am enjoying it. So with all that, there is little time - and I must admit also little interest in doing a lot of paper model building at this time. I hope you can forgive me for that.

Other news is that the latest film we made, ANS - The first Dutch space adventure, will be shown on the island of Texel in september and there are negotiations going on to get it on national TV. Keep your fingers crossed!
The second premiere in Groningen went great, the carillion concert was touching. Satellite of Love, Across the Universe, Rocketman, All for this film and the little satellite. The film was very well-received. There was a little Q&A afterwards and people were genuinely interested in the history of ANS. ANd a newspaper review said the film felt like "a boy's adventure book".  I remembered that backin the days we tried to get the film off of the ground, an executive producer of a TV program we tried to get involved in broadcasting the docu, told us he didn't think the subject was exciting enough to make film out of. We proved him so wrong. HA!

I do have some model plans, I want to do a bigger model (in 1/48 or larger) of the Dragon capsule and trunk, there is this little model of the Blue Origin New Shepard I still want to finish for the National Space Museum and I am working on a Triumph Sprite (Frog Eye) model which is on the workbench as we speak. All that will be postponed util I feel there is time again. But for now I really have to concentrate on my job for a while. There's so much to learn and get acquainted with...

See you soon, stay safe, healthy and from the Netherlands a heartfelt 'long live Ukraine!'

--PK

SN20 cancelled; P-40 finished.

So I was working on SpaceX's Starship SN20 with eventually the plan to add its BN4 booster to create the whole giant stack. But recently, after watching some space news channel on YT, I heard both of the stages already are obsolete. And, well, of course. SpaceX is letting their their rockets evolve faster than I can build a model. Faster than they can actually build an launch them themselves.
And now the whole stack apparently is rendered obsolete. As someone on Reddit said: “The designs have iterated so far away from a flying corn silo to an actual spaceship that the only use in launching the old design would be to see something crash or blow up.” And although I find the technology of SN20 hardly compares to that of a corn silo, of course that isn’t enough to launch something. I only hope they still put those brilliant but also quickly ageing Raptor 1-engines to use.

Nice shiny metallic card and detailed heat shield tiles.

Proof of concept. Just one ring and the tilework glued over the metallic stuff to create some relief.
Edges coloured. It looks damn good. The relief is exactly how it should look.

The latest version of Starship has different vents that simultaneously function as manoeuvring jets. The booster has them too and an entirely different  layout of the COPV-tanks around the outside, They now apparently are placed in a long row and with an aerodynamic cover they act as chines to improve the flight characteristics of the rocket during the return. I like seeing those changes happening on the fly. It is a little reminiscent of how NASA in the sixties improved their designs on the go. It is exciting and mind-boggling how they solve problems, how quickly they do it and how they improve the design on the fly, while working towards a launch. But the SN20 / B04 stack now apparently is nothing but an addition to the growing unused rocket garden. I'd say, museum stuff.

I slightly cut the metallic card to create panel lines. I used AXM's model as a template,
but I enlarged it 104% to get 1/96 scale to fit right in with the rest of my rockets.

It looks neat from here. I know. It does. But the strips with the heat shield tiles (not seen here cause they're
on the back) were quite messy. The seams were very visible and left some notable gaps. I couldn't camouflage it all with just coloured pencil. It wasn't wobbly but the amount of rings in this ogive shape I think, also played
a role in the messy look. And also because I wasn't able to easily test fit the tile strips on to the metallic card, because I had to use CA glue to stick it to the smooth surface. Lesson for the next try. Test fit first.

A long time ago, I decided I would only build stuff that actually has flown or at least flew once to keep the shelves free from clutter (i.e. unflown and untested spacecraft - apart from What-ifs of course.), I will wait for the final first flown prototype.

Luckily, I wasn't too far in with building the rocket, I only finished the nose cone. The result was not bad, but far from good. The seams were too visible and the whole matter was quite messy, at least to my eyes. It was a good lesson, and I still really want to build the giant stack. Bit now i'll wait until there has been one that actually flew.

So I am diverting again, making a little… Prudenziative evasion. This time it’s a Curtiss P40 to add to the collection. As usual, I take Zio's planes in a quite light manner. I don't go for detail, I don't go for perfection, I just go for the sheer joy of building a little paper plane that looks the part. For more, click on the "read the rest" thingy below the photo.

Still here but quite occupied..

Like the title says, I am still here. I even started a build (but I am not that happy about it so I might just abandon it). I also am very very busy at the moment. The ANS-documentary is finished and will premiere this month. Hectic times, moreso because I found a new day job. I will start in May.

So I don't have that much time right now to build any paper model...

I can however, show you the trailer of the documentary:

Here is a link to Vimeo for the English subtitled trailer.

Stay posted for new projects. Stay safe, be nice to one another and Слава Україні! 🇺🇦!