Grymn Flier - XII

All camouflage work done. Most of the details complete or just blocked in black.

Still to do : Metal coat on the diamond plate, edge highlighting of all the panels (urgh! - I hate that bit!), winter weathering.

The picture shows the 8 year old paint job I am trying to match on the largest APC.

Grymn Flier - XI

A flier and a couple of old crow vehicles. Camouflage laid down and (just because I couldn't resist) masking removed to see the green windscreen.

Lots more weathering and detail painting with the hairy stick to be done.

Grymn Flier - X

Group shot of the vehicles. All the 'glass' areas have been airbrushed and blacked out then highlighted up with white ready for either a blue or green glaze. I'm pretty happy with how the airbrush highlight turned out. Once the windows have been complete I shall varnish and then mask them out to paint the camouflage on the main body.

After this the blue Tamiya translucent blue all went a bit wrong - it really is a nightmare to get a smooth thin coverage. Grrr... so back to the black and white highlight by airbrush and a change of direction.

I decided to go for a green tint rather than blue as the general tone of the camouflage scheme is blue-grey so this should stand out more.

Now I have to try and find my bottle of liquid mask...

Grymn Flier - IX

I PAINTED SOMETHING!

Ok so it's only three swatches of colour. It's nothing to write home about. But I have found the colour recipe for the original winter camouflage scheme. Not bad after only 8 years!

Grymn Fliers - VIII

Thought I'd clean the airbrush. And then clean the airbrush. And then for a change, clean the airbrush some more.

And then put some undercoat on the fliers and other models. This is an all over coat of grey primer, followed by Zenithal undercoat - black shot on the underside of the models and a thin white coat shot from the top down. I've never done this before, but it's intended to show through the top coat so that you get a more natural shading of the model colours. I remain to see if this affects my painting.

All the models here other than the fliers are from Old Crow Models.

Grymn Flier - VII

All three in the Squadron ready for paint...

Shown with interchangeable (left to right) radar/comms pack (2), cannon (2) and missile rack.

Grymn Flier - VI

Landing gear and tail fin complete.

Tail is made from three sheets of styrene laminated together and then sanded into a vaguely aerofoil cross section. Its attached with three struts made from paperclips.

 ... and on its mobile landing pad.

 I have the other two to finish and then its on to paint.

Grymn Flier - V

Current thinking on the tail.

Yes, i know that using CAD is a bit of overkill for this, but its a very quick way of sketching up a number of possible shapes and seeing how they look.

Grymn Flier - IV

First attempt at a simple frame for the landing gear. Clearly needs more detailing and also to straighten the lower rail. I shall add "skids" from strip plasticard to the bottom too.

I'm not sure...

Opinions??

Old Crow Recon Units - I

As well as the fliers I have been detailing up some Old Crow Gecko and Goanna Scout Vehicles as reconnaissance and light fast transports for my Grymn.

I'll post progress on painting over the coming days.

Grymn Flier - III

I think I have solved the issue of the weapon mount for the fliers.

The barrel is a little long, but can easily be reduced... it swivels left to right but not up and down. I think that's OK as a wargame model. This mount means its not as low as I thought it might be, so the landing skids wont need to be as tall! result!!

I found this by sorting through my Old Crow 'bits box'. (yes I have a bits box just for old crow! - although I think it has some Zinge Industries flexible cables, gears and and hatches in there too...)

Contents :

I have a lot of modular turret parts that I shall be sorting through in order to create some options for the large number of old crow vehicles I own.

Old Crow Modular Vehicles

I bought these modular vehicles from Old Crow some time ago.

... and finally got around to assembling them ...


Each section is preassembled and has a pair of magnets in it to locate them together. They are going to be utility trucks that house all the necessary equipment to deploy the fliers and three of them will tow the mobile landing pads. The forth is going to tow a generator.

Wheels have been left off for now to aid painting.

Grymn Flier - I

I made three of these mobile landing pads some years ago. They were my first tentative venture into laser cutting.

I always intended for the mobile landing pads to be like forward deployed mobile bases from which to operate small one-man (grymn) recon and light support fliers.

Initially I had hoped to use the long awaited and fabled Hasslefree Grymn Grav Bike to operate from these bases.

When it became clear that the Grav Bike had been abandoned and Hasslefree had prototyped a new Flier I hoped this one would be commercially available, but it wasn't to be.

So finally I thought that a8 years of waiting and begging was probably enough time and I should do something about it.  After hunting for suitable commerical fliersand getting recommendations from a few forums (fora?) I decided the only thing to do was to build it myself.

Aims

• One man crew
• Lightly armed - nose gun or maybe a small missile pod.
• Highly manoeverable
• Clean panels to match the feel of the Old Crow 25mm vehicles these will be towed by. No rivets, skulls or other Gothic nonsense here.
• VTOL - lift fans / rotors
• Small enough to both land on and be shipped by the mobile landing pad.

I liked what I did with the rotors on the Grymn Flier that I painted as a diorama a few years ago, so I thought I'd do something similar.

Parts List

Rotors/Fans from Zinge Industries:

Revell Pocket Snap Kit - Jedi StarFighter

 

Old crow weapon mounts

Progress

So far I have this...

 
I'm pretty happy with this prototype but still figuring out how to do a short stubby tail fin and landing gear. I have three to make in total.

Old crow 6mm

Along with the modular vehicles I showed a couple of day's ago, Jed from Old Crow also sent me these.

Early 6mm versions of his existing 28/15mm line of vehicles. I've always wanted to be able to field battalion sized 6mm forces and 28mm skirmish using the same forces.

My dream gets closer, now all I need are 6mm grymn!

Old Crow Modular Vehicles

At Salute 2012 there was a Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons chase game where I came across the 28mm orange vehicle here...

I recognised the style as Old Crow and this was confirmed talking to the helpful guys on the stand.
Well, a few emails with Jez at Old Crow later, and I'd twisted his arm to sell me some before they went on sale.

These are modular vehicles, configurable in a number of ways. The modules include a front cab a wheel section, a mid section and a rear piece. There are also differing side pieces including with or without windows, and roof sections with hatches, weapon hard points or plain. The number of options is truly enormous. I'm so taken with the modularity that I'm going to figure out how to put this lot together with magnets.

Mobile Landing Pad - Revisited

Those of you who have been following my blog for some time might well remember my first foray into laser cutting. The idea was to build some modular vehicles based on Old Crow 25mm resin vehicle chassis. As a starting point I designed a mobile helipad and had a couple of prototypes cut.

Soon afterwards I was contacted by Dave Adams who is also an old crow nut and I sent him one of the prototypes. At this point I should apologise to Dave as it has taken me an inordinately long time to post the following pictures of his work and also to thank him. I think the pictures are wonderful and really made me smile when I saw how well his model has turned out.

 

  Thank you Dave!