Hobby Thread - August 16, 2025 [TRex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. Good news! The Ace of Spades Wheel of HobbiesTM) is back in service. We gave the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies(TM) a spin and it landed on small scale restorations.

I have faith that you can either find something in the content that resonates or contribute your own hobbying interests.

You might be tempted to say "I have no hobbies or interests." Bah. Dig around in the content and soak in the comments. Be curious. Glad you're here.

What are you hobbying?

As per usual Hobby Thread etiquette, keep this thread limited to hobbying. All (legal) hobbying is welcome. However, politics, current events and religious debates can live in threads elsewhere. Pants are optional. Puns are welcome and encouraged.

Play nice. Don't be a troll and do not feed the trolls.

I had a different theme for this week but put it on hold for now when I stumbled onto this video:

A lot of hobbying involves building new things, but what about giving old things new life? What could be more fun than restoring an old Tonka fire truck. The first five minutes are solely disassembly. The simple fire truck has 84 pieces.

After watching, the sheer breadth of skills involved impressed me. The more I watched videos like this, the more it struck me how many individual skills are utilized to make restorations work. In some cases, the need is stripping and repainting metal. In other cases, it is re-manufacturing fasteners or missing parts.

One noteworthy aspect that stuck out to me on this one: a process called "retrobrighting" submerged yellowed plastic material in hydrogen peroxide and hit it with UV lights for several days. The process restored the yellowed plastic to its original bright white color. May be old news to everyone else, but news to me.

With that introduction, let's talk about small scale restorations. We'll leave restorations of houses, structures and vehicles for another thread. I'm thinking tools, household goods, toys, and furniture.

An item is only original once, so there is always peril in "restoring" something to make it "better than new." Some old is earned patina and character, but some old just needs to be cleaned and fixed.

I had no idea that restoration videos were such a big thing on the interwebs. As you might imagine, the worse starting condition, the more dramatic the transformation and end result. The fire truck above has 7.7 million views. Disappointingly, so many videos have been infected by the clickbait disease and/or people trying to make money from repairs and reselling. (Furniture videos especially: "YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE THE TRANSFORMATION!! I WAS ABLE TO REPAINT THIS SIDE TABLE AND MAKE A HUGE PROFIT!!!") I've tried to pick a few for this thread that have an interesting subject and inoffensive commentary (or no commentary where possible).

With so many scale modelers among the Horde, seemed appropriate to start with an X-wing restoration. This one also includes a retrobrighting process to address yellow plastic.

Have you gone back and overhauled models you built previously?

There are others on the interwebs, but here's a Matchbox car restoration. This one caught my eye because of the shark nose Ferrari F1 subject car. It also caught my eye because of the small-scale home zinc-plating process shown.

A 1911 restoration - complete with test fire at the end? Sure!

This video of a sewing machine restoration has over 26 million views. Amazing. Can you imagine the person that made this 1864 Singer seeing it now?

Wonder how this safe got to this state, but the restoration journey is very satisfying. This is one for those that enjoy metal work.

Some people are into restoring arcade video games. More power to them. Personally, I try to avoid anything with that much wiring and electronics.

I had thoughts of doing a stained glass theme for a Hobby Thread, but thought it might be too narrow. True?

Top photo:

I love seeing how things are made. Same goes for hobbying projects. Tankascribe sent the eclipse photo at the top along with work in process photos and notes. Not enough room to include all of it here but it took 10 hours so we can make some space for a glimpse of the origin story.

Before we get into the painting process, here's a closer look at the sun part of the painting so you can appreciate the layering and colors. I don't know if tankascribe would agree, but this is a painting that got more impressive the closer I looked.

How did it start?

I had a ready-primed canvas long narrow canvas. Used a circle template to plop down a circle for the eclipsed sun (carefully off center but within the area of interest), with another larger one around it to approximate the corona, then just started to paint.

Roughed in the Texas landscape at the bottom, with the Llano river bordered by the trees and farther hills on the opposite side. Roughed in the "sunrise" colors on the left and right with more clouds above it. Got a lot of orangish primer to cover up with more overcast and clouds, but it was a good start.

This is how it evolved:

Mixed up a lot of mid-tone grey and used that to cover up all of the orange primer. Of course the entire thing immediately got duller, without having the orange/blue complements playing off each other and the primer is still shining up through some of it, making those areas look warmer.

"False sunrise" colors during the eclipse go in the exact opposite order than they would normally. Normally, the closer in towards the sun you go on the horizon, the warmer and more yellow the color becomes. As you move away from the sun it goes orange and into red, then cool red and purples. But in this case, because the sun itself was blocked out and the light on the horizon was what was leaking around the moon's shadow, the light is brighter and warmer the farther away from the
shadow band you go.

Spent an hour working on the sun's corona, getting that to shine brighter and making it more uneven. Started also working on giving the moon more dimension.

Next up was working the sky holes and clouds. Darkening up things, working to get that impression of the very dark shadow running right up the sky. Making the sky between clouds go from the regular light warm blues into cooler ultramarine and then the very dark Prussian blue traveling inward and upward. Then the clouds which will have the greatest contrast and range of values up around the eclipsed sun, becoming even softer and less distinct traveling downwards to the horizon.

Worked on extending the dark shadow band down the sky, a lot more
work over the top edge and down along the right side of the sky. Thought there should be more, brighter sunrise color over on the right side so put some of that in, being careful to edge it upwards a ways so the thing isn't totally symmetrical, which would be boring. Placed some bluish-green lighter cloud in the sunrise areas down by the horizon, and was quietly proud that I mixed up that color and matched it perfectly to that in the photos.

Got out the T-square and trued up the horizon line, which had gotten squiggly. Put some edge-lighting on some of the clouds around the sky hole where the eclipsed
sun appears.

The band of clouds down the dark shadow band were all too close in value - when squinting my eyes, it just turned into one dark blur down there. So spent time adding some good darks in some places and lighting edges of clouds in
others.

Tried to make everything have more blue the farther down the sky you go, while warming up the clouds up near the sun. Interjected more color into the false "sunrises" on either side of the shadow band. Pulled the corona out farther to give it three prongs instead of just two.

Final touches: Got more values going in the clouds in the lower third, making them a bit more highlighted but careful to use more blue in everything so they recede. Did some more cloudy detail work up around the sun making them more warm and rosy. Did a bit of highlighting on the line of trees along the river bank, lightened the distant hills just a touch more, and added a little more warm color to the water at either edge to reflect the "sunrises" in the sky above. Done!

Final result at the top.

Remember this painting when someone asks "How much detail can you put in clouds? How long can it really take to paint clouds?" It takes about 10 hours and involves a lot of color shading and highlights. I thought this level of detail would be interesting to the painters among the Horde.

Thank you for sharing! Well done tankascribe!

Remember - the Hobby Thread mailbox is always open if you would like to share your own hobbying projects.

Not a word of commentary and over 15 million views in 7 months. Amazing.

Same guy. Over 5 million views of a guy building a small hut out of pallets with no power tools.

This is more of a commercial endeavor than a pure hobby, but you'll understand why it got included.

Did you miss the Hobby Thread last week? We did a telescopes and night sky photography theme. The comments may be closed, but you can re-live the content.

Both were linked in the comments, but both deserve a place in the content. Beckoning Chasm lunar photo:

Martini Farmer lunar photo:

Random follow up from last week, courtesy of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum:

Q: Can astronauts burp in space?
A: Not really - at least not the kind of burping we do here on Earth.

In space, astronauts are in a constant state of freefall, so gravity doesn't help separate gases from everything else in their stomachs. This means that the gases don't naturally stay near the top of the stomach, while the heavier liquids and solids settle to the bottom. Without the affect of gravity, the gases, foods, and liquids stay floating together. So if an astronaut tries to burp in space, a little bit of everything comes up (solids, liquids, and gases). Basically, burping in space means throwing up a little.

You're welcome.

Notable comments from last week:

And a big bright gold star to Ben Had for this gem:

Words of wisdom:

"Because despite all our troubles, when things are grim out in that wide round world of ours, that's when it's really important to have a good hobby." Posted by: tankascribe at June 22, 2024 07:41 PM (HWxAD).

Would TRex include a mystery click behind the top photo in a Hobby Thread? Maybe... If you have trouble finding something in the content or comments that resonates with you, hijack the thread for your hobbying as you see fit. We will feature a different theme next time. What are you hobbying? We love showing off Horde hobbying. Send thoughts, suggestions and photos of your hobbying to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Do mighty things.