You're welcome Helge, glad the suggestion was helpful to you!
As for the other issues in you blog, I have some answers for you:
1) Don't dremel out the big guns on these sorts of old models. As you noted, they are never round anyway and it just ends up looking odd. Instead, I make sure the area is nice and flat, and I glue a piece of plasticard (either a cut-out circle, or a piece of rod, or a piece of tubing - it just needs to be circular and about 1.5mm thick) onto it. Then I drill out the plasticard to the required diameter, and finally a drop a tiny piece of putty into the bore and smooth it around. The smoothing of the bore with a little putty helps to graduate the rim into the 'black' hole of the bore when you paint it, and helps to give the impression of more depth than there really is. You can see what sort of effects this give in my Squat TOEG blog here. This also has two other advantages; it helps add a little more detail to often plain areas to these old models, and it can be used to reduce the bore to a more reasonable size in some cases too.
2) The cannon rims (if you do something similar to (1) above) would look good in brass or silver, especially if you use a blue and brown ink mix to discolour the metal a little (the ink mix helps make things look heat-tarnished).
3) I would raise the rim a little on the Cauldrons in the same way as the Cannon barrels. And I'd just do a few layers of good gloss varnish rather than use water effects - they are fiddly to use and often go wrong. Even when they go right, the stuff can shrink a little which leaves a notable concave meniscus.
4) I like the Brass Scorpion, but I'd probably have done the big tail cable in a blue-black rather than the green, as I think it puts too much green on the model overall for my tastes.
I do love these old models though (and I sympathise with the clean up that they require!), and I think you've done a fantastic job with them - I especially like the skulls (which always give me trouble!)
