Dazzle Camouflage

Hi-Roller II from Hot Wheels, in a new design.

Sort of a dazzle camouflage paint scheme.

Maybe it prevents the police from estimating your speed correctly.

Very different from the original blue and silver.

Another luxury automobile added to the fleet.
 

Personnel at the Kiss Kiss Club

The Kiss Kiss Club staff wears a uniform that reflects the costume of the band.

Here the white plastic figures have had their red shirts, red hats, and their skin painted.

They all have the same base shape.  I use base shape and color to define certain groups without having to be too obvious.  Your mission Mr. Bond is to meet the man at the bar with a dark green base that is rectangular but rounded at the corners.

Here black shiny pants, shoes and their hair have been painted.  That's about all I paint for most figures.  The bases will be gray to match the concrete on some parts of the floor.

Sandbox sand, or beach sand, also called play sand.  Just plain old sand from Lowes, comes in a big bag for kids to play with.

For a couple years I have been gathering spice jars to put Woodland Scenics products into, and of course, play sand.

This young lady is the fire walker entertainment at the Kiss Kiss Club.  She wears her gold bikini as seen in the movie, except my paint brush is too big to paint it as small as it is in the movie!  The beach sand is going to be glued to a small base and painted so she can do her fire walking act.
 

Restroom Construction

In the James Bond movie Thunderball, he has been shot in the leg and he goes into the Kiss Kiss Club. 

There he visits the men's room to tend to his wound.

So I am taking one of my tiki bar buildings and converting it into the restrooms.

Taking some little strips of plastic and a rectangle of plastic to make the two doors.  Top piece has been glued together to make it double thick.

My daughter made me a Kiss Kiss poster that she designed based on the one in the movie.  The aluminum foil is for mixing 5 minute epoxy on.

I used a thick piece of sheet plastic to cover the opening in the tiki bar piece, glued on with the 5 minute epoxy.  Mock up of the doors before final trimming.

Glued together, on the the poster I used temporary glue for the look.  The poster is too big and I am going to have to resize it.  1/72nd scale figure for scale.  Still needs to be painted.
 

Bug Hunts Service Guarantees Citizenship, Camrade

In 1952 Joseph Stalin had his scientists working on atomic bombs in Chelyabinsk.

But the villagers in the area were reporting sightings of strange giant things in the forest.

Concerned about these reports Stalin directed Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria to discretely find the giant thing and destroy it.  Not wanting to deploy substantial resources to the project, he had .50 caliber Maxim guns places on wheeled artillery carriages and sent to the area to deal with the problem.

The US Army had also deployed such weapons in the past.

During the First World War these guns were taken from storage and were intended for coast defense against landing boats, or with their powerful .50 caliber cartridge, to cut down massed horse cavalry charges.

The gun crew consisted of a gunner who fired the weapon, two loaders, #1 to carry ammo from the limber and #2 to feed the ammo to the gun.  A third man was the gun commander who would observe targets and direct the gunner.  There was also a horse holder who maintained the horses, limber, caisson, and sometimes would help bring ammo forward. 

The men were trained in all the positions and could take over for one another in the event of a casualty.

None of these served overseas but were deployed around the coastal perimeter, southern border, and Canal Zone of the United States.

The unexplored jungles of the Canal Zones were particularly dangerous.

It's the only time these guns were fired in anger by US forces when gun #2 of a four gun battery defended the Canal Zone from a giant tarantula.

In the early 1950s a similar weapon was used by the Soviet Union to dispatch a giant tarantula that was ravaging cattle herds in Soviet Chelyabinsk.  The cause of the giant in the Soviet Union was thought to be sloppy atomic research contaminating the local area with radioactive waste.  The cause of the giant tarantula in the Canal Zone remains unknown.

Soviet figures by Atlantic, and generic civilians, US Army by Hat WWI US artillery crews, gun carriage by Eagle Games and giant Maxim gun by Atlantic WWII Russian set, all in 1/72nd scale.