It has been a very busy past six weeks for me, juggling my time between keeping up with orders, producing products and working on new parts. Over the last few months I have been able to clear a lot of delayed orders and currently most orders are shipping in less than a week. I do have about 20 orders that are being held up waiting for new parts to be produced, mainly requiring photo-etched parts. This is a update on the progress of these parts. I am hoping to have all the new artwork completed in the next few days so I can transform them into artwork sheets for making film and getting it to the photo-etch company.
Some good news is that the photo-etch company that I have been doing business with for over ten years have agreed to carry on making my parts. I was informed over a month ago that they were stopping photo-etching, this was however not strictly true. They are in fact stopping doing outside work and only photo-etching for their own contacts. The owner is retiring and his brother is taking over the business and has agreed to continue working with me for as long as I continue making 6 scale parts.
You will see from the following that I have pulled out all the stops to get my new parts made. These are parts for delayed orders plus some new products.
Here is the artwork done to date, there are still a few more drawings to do.
Stug III and a few other parts. Completed.
Panther IR Scope Completed.
Tiger 2 Rear Mudguards. Completed.
SdKfz 222-250/9 Turret Grill. Still to be finalized.
This has been a problem and still not perfected. As I am sure you know there are two types of grills for the 222 with the 2 cm gun fitted. The first is a low profile were the grill is cut around some of the gun parts. The later type was a higher profile and the grill fitted over the entire gun. I found that the low profile grill was not possible to make without a complete 222 with gun fitted as I could not guarantee the grill would fit around the gun parts. I have gone with the high profile grill which gets rid of this problem. Below is the artwork as far as I have got.
Other parts which may be completed to be included in my next batch of photo-etched parts are:
Centurion driver periscope parts.
Tiger 1 Drum Cupola vision block and other parts to complete the interior of the drum cupola.
Even with all the basic artwork done there is still several days of work to transform these drawings into artwork sheets for making film. I have used the artwork for my tools clamps to explain this. All the parts have to be plotted in a artwork sheet rather like putting a jigsaw together maximizing the yield from each sheet. Each sheet has a obverse and reverse side, half etch lines to give bend lines have to be removed for bend lines on the reverse side. This is then saved as the obverse side. The original artwork is the flipped to make the reverse side and lines removed for bend lines on the obverse side. This has to be done very carefully, if I leave a etch line on both sides the parts will be cut in half at that point.
Obverse side.
Reverse side
Regards
Mike