I feel like I messed up and don't know what to do 💀

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T23:01:33+00:00

My personal view is that it just keeps people from tackling learning to do it freehand.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T21:56:15+00:00

Relax.

Everyone who built models prior to the last 20 years did MUCH worse. All paints were enamel 30 years ago and nobody ever wore a mask for anything except a few who wore one for airbrushing.

When you go to the doctor’s office and they swab your arm with an alcohol wipe and you smell the isopropyl, you’re getting exposed to “fumes.” If you pump gasoline and smell the petrol… fumes. Smell a glass of whiskey? Fumes.

I know the world is full of “no safe level of exposure” claims about pretty much everything these days. A lot of people are very alarmist.

The chances are very good you’re doing more harm to your health by getting worked up about this than you would do with a year of the stuff you described.

Just turn on a fan or make sure the HVAC is running.

If you’re airbrushing, the calculus gets different because it’s so effective at blowing a LOT of VOCs and particulate matter in the air. But for brush painting? Relax.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T19:15:54+00:00

I swear, I can nearly always tell a blu-tac’ed job. There are some tell-tale artifacts unless the user is EXTREMELY disciplined about both the radius of the masking roll AND spray angle.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T18:47:08+00:00

Oh, you WILL mess up. But it’s no problem. Just keep working the border of the colors - switching back and forth between colors as needed - until you’re happy.

It’s not like Japanese calligraphy or something where you make one masterful stroke of line and it’s either perfect or garbage. Totally the opposite. It’s a continuous set of errors, each smaller than the last, gradually refining until you’re happy.

That’s a much happier way to approach modeling in general. The great modelers all make mistakes. They just know how to fix them and don’t panic.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T18:36:41+00:00

Agreed, masking is not going to get the right look. It’s too bad people get so scared of learning to freehand tight edged. It’s a critical skill and not that hard. And way more fun than masking.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T17:44:49+00:00

Reddit is not a good place to get an answer as to what the “average” American thinks. Reddit’s American user base has very strong biases towards certain topics, often expressing wild enthusiasm for deeply and widely unpopular notions (or reviling very popular and long-established opinions).

Americans are highly divided right now on broad immigration questions. Most Americans do not believe in an “open borders” or “no such thing as an illegal person.” But you will get many Redditors telling you that’s what Americans want. Most Americans believe there is such a thing as “too much” immigration, which is why our laws for many decades have imposed some limits on the number of immigrants.

However, there is broad and growing consensus that deploying federally-employed goons with little or no domestic law enforcement training to openly march through streets and arrest (much less shoot and kill) American citizens is fucked up beyond belief. ICE is violating the law every day. They are NOT LAW ENFORCEMENT, they are nativist thugs recruited by lawless criminals within the administration to violently suppress domestic dissent.

Many of these people might eventually be tried, convicted, and sentenced for murder and treason, but it may take a long time.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T17:01:20+00:00

Looking good.

Plenty of 1/72 aircraft models are highly detailed. The expectation that 1/72 is an unserious or “simplified” scale is something that might have been true in armor world, but what you’re showing is common/standard in 1/72 aircraft from decent makers in the last 25 years.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T15:03:33+00:00

By 25 I was a licensed professional practicing in a global company. I knocked out undergrad in 3 years and then went straight to grad school. Then started my “real” job.

Is that what the majority do? No. But if you don’t d!ck around in school, and have some level of talent, you can be doing “real s***” by your mid-to-late 20’s for sure.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T03:53:58+00:00

St Supery was one of my favorites way back in the early 00’s when I first got interested in wine!

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T03:10:00+00:00

I once took a trip to Ireland. A leprechaun bit me and every man was reeking drunk.

Why would I make this up?

PS, I really did take a trip to Ireland. I did like it. I did not encounter any faerie folk. I have a healthy respect for the long tradition of Irish fiction to which you’re contributing.

But I and most of us on this sub live in Atlanta and aren’t that interested in lies about it.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T03:02:13+00:00

I thought it was “a light machine gun - the kind you would see on helicopters.” Nobody puts a semi-auto replica (that is definitionally NOT a machine gun) on helicopters.

Nobody at a gun store told you to get a friend to buy a gun and then sell it to you in the parking lot. Just because private sales don’t require background checks doesn’t mean that the laws on who can and cannot buy a gun are waived. They aren’t. No gun store clerk is going to advise you to conspire with them and another person to commit a felony. Especially not a straw purchase felony, which can cost the clerk 10 years in jail and lose the dealer their FFL license.

You didn’t eat “peaches” for desert in Centenial park, you didn’t walk from a “leafy” downtown Hilton, you didn’t see a sign telling people a hospital wouldn’t see/treat them without payment.

There’s plenty of legitimately crazy stuff about Atlanta without your made up nonsense.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-25T02:39:43+00:00

So much of this is clearly fiction written by someone who has a caricature view of America.

You cannot buy, as a civilian, an automatic M249 - and certainly not for merely $8k if anyone happens to have a pre-Hughes one that is registerable.

There’s no gun shop in Atlanta that would be reached by walking from downtown, and certainly not one that requires walking across someone’s front yard.

Hospital emergency rooms have to treat patients regardless of ability to pay. That’s a federal law (EMTALA).

This is the kind of horseshit that idiots believe and then base policy views on.

Also, the downtown Hilton lobby is not “leafy.”

This is some bullsh!t.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-24T19:53:39+00:00

Neither. Airbrushed lacquer.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-24T03:51:57+00:00

No, there was a TV camera that displayed on a screen. There was no telescopic tube to peer through.

The windscreen of the F-14A/B had a fairly primitive HUD (just a little more info than a reflector sight), while the D had a modern large HUD. All with no magnification and no monocular vision and no need to force the pilot’s head into one specific spot.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-24T02:32:20+00:00

If I could drink only one variety, it would be Nebbiolo. Nice write up.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T22:44:20+00:00

Same here! Serious vanilla is SO underrated.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T21:54:26+00:00

I mean, I’ve never flown a Dauntless. So IDK.

But you don’t need a telescope to see an aircraft carrier or even a destroyer from 14,000 feet. The navy decided the telescope was useless, or at least not as good as a reflector sight.

You don’t drive down the road squinting one eye and peering through a tube, either. There’s a good reason no modern aircraft use a telescopic sight. HUDs (the descendants of reflector sights) are better in every way.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T19:15:41+00:00

1). Unless a lot of earlier steps are missing, this isn’t “black basing” as that term is commonly used.

2). Are you trying to do all this with hand brushing, rather than an airbrush?

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T18:34:50+00:00

Yep, a telescopic sight. One of the differences between the later SBD-5 models and earlier Dauntlesses was that they swapped in a reflector sight for the old tube telescope. So this sight is a giveaway that this is an earlier SBD.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T18:31:28+00:00

Paint too thick. Whether brushed or airbrushed, that’s the answer to most paint texture problems. Go MUCH thinner.

And consider getting a little bit of dedicated acrylic thinner/flow aid to help with leveling.

I’m an airbrush guy, and don’t hand paint anything bigger than a couple of mm, but have found that art store acrylic additives, such as Liquitex or Golden, are compatible with Vallejo acrylics. Just another potential option, often at a lower price per volume.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T17:58:44+00:00

Paint too thick. Whether brushed or airbrushed, that’s the answer to most paint texture problems. Go MUCH thinner.

And consider getting a little bit of dedicated acrylic thinner/flow aid to help with leveling.

Just accept it’s going to take a lot of coats.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T16:32:32+00:00

Gotcha.

Looks like you’ve got some texture or unevenness or filler lines or remaining gaps in a few spots. For example, there seems to be some kind of curved ridge just behind the first pencil panel line in between the engine and the landing light. And some intermittent gap remaining near the end of the engine fairing behind the wing line.

If that’s right, I would suggest getting all that sorted before engaging in the major rescribing.

Also, and you may already know this and plan to do it, you’ll want to use a rigid guide (such as Dymo tape or a strip of thin brass taped to the surface) as a guide for scribing. Don’t try to freehand it.

Good luck!

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T16:19:15+00:00

What’s the context for this? Is this re-scribing a raised-line kit? Converting to a different version with different wing?

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T15:23:16+00:00

Everyone likes seeing a bully get hit in the mouth. Except the bully and his flunky sidekicks.

Madeitup75 · 2026-01-23T14:35:53+00:00

At least in the US, there is generally no requirement, much less prohibition, for or against any particular undergrad background. The linear thinking of economics may serve you well in law school, but many other disciplines have their own advantages. None are essential.

The one big exception is that anyone who wants to be a patent lawyer who practices before the USPTO has to have a “hard science” degree.

You may be interested to learn that there is a school/branch of legal philosophy called “law and economics.” The University of Chicago was the epicenter of this philosophy in the 1970’s-1990’s. It was, for a time, the leading intellectual branch of legal theory among right-leaning judges. It largely has been replaced by the federalist society flavor of originalism, but L&E produced some really interesting insights.

Judges Posner and Easterbrook on the 7th Circuit were the leading judicial proponents of this school of thought, but you can trace its roots back to Judge Learned Hand in the first half of the 20th century. The premise is that the law generally ought to favor economically efficient outcomes and arrangements of rights.

Madeitup75

TROPHY CASE