Resins, RTV, and Finally a Little Paint on the Black Brigade

I spent most of the weekend working on my scratch-built version of the Polski-FIAT 518 field truck. Unfortunately it is not quite done yet, but I hope to get some "in progress" photos up this week. The big question is what to do with it afterward as I need to cast several and I'm still having issues with my resins and RTV's.

The older RTV from Alumilite appears to be past its freshness date, so I'd have to get new. The new RTV from MPK seems to work well, but is far less flexible than the Alumilite resin, and I've had a lot of trouble getting small bubbles out of it (which could also be the resin, but I am down to the MPK resin at this point so I can't try alternates to debug the issue). This has led to about 20%-30% yield of good casts on the Vickers bodies, which isn't acceptable.

In an effort to speed things up, I picked up another RTV from Micromark with a four hour cure time. At this point I'm not impressed as the molds do cure quickly, but the rubber tears rather than stretches. I'm going to give it another shot, but this one may be headed for the trash bin quickly.

I'm also updating the wheels for the staff cars, as the ones provided in the True North miniature lacked some of the detail needed to be accurate. I'm trying to cast up several of the wheels as I'll need more than one of the staff cars once I'm done. I'll then use the metal wheels from the True North staff cars for my 518 and 508's (well, mostly...)

While I was waiting for resin and RTV to cure, I decided to go ahead and start putting some paint on the miniatures. I now have all of the figures cleaned up and primed. Well, relatively cleaned up - you always find new and exciting mold lines in the painting process that require work! I've started on the Green Brown (Vallejo 879) for the uniforms that aren't going to be a black coat. I'm using Khaki (Vallejo 988) for the Black Brigade helmets. I managed to get about half of the Green Brown down at this point. Fortunately the field kit on most of the miniatures is more sparse than on most of the German ones!