Catch up with PART FOUR here
Time for an update. With the weekend devoted to the kids I only got a little done in the evenings. The wheels are finished bar the hubcaps. Being Tamiya and newer they weren’t a direct swap out for the kit parts so had to be drilled out to fit and I did that by hand leaving me with a lovely blister. The right side fenders are also finished with the little springs added. I know I said I wasn’t going to get too much into detailing but it’s amazing how it sneaks up on you. “I’ll just add this” leads to “I better change that too” and suddenly you find yourself at “I better rebuild all that”. I did resist the urge to add a RB Model metal barrel though. Yay me.
The turret has received most of the attention the last few days. The side door fit is shocking and resulted in one whole side of each pair having to be totally rebuilt to fit. I had to fill in the over sized hole, cut away the hinges and rebuild new ones. It would have been a little easier if I hadn’t decided to glue the hinge part into the inside of the turret last week when I put the turret together. If I hadn’t done that I probaly could have just repositioned them where they needed to be then filled in behind them ( there’s a tip for anyone building this kit ). But now they look more like they should, including the handle.
The cupola also got added and the stowage box got detailed with the lid lip added, reinforcing strips and rivets added, and two hasp and staples added, one with a padlock added as well. I had to fill in the mounting holes on the back of the turret though as they were way to deep so filled them in, sanded them back and then added pieces of evergreen strips with weldbeads around the edges for the bin mounts to attach to.
The aerial mount has been added. I had to build one from scratch to represent the rubber mount. There’s still a lot of tidying up to do but I’ll wait till I have the shurzen mounts on and then I can finish off all the weld beads and then do the final tidy up. The zimmerit on the mantlet needs a bit of clean up around the vision port cover and the mg and I might redo the top edge where it’s not as defined as I would have liked.
The plan tomorrow is to get the lower hull zimmerit finished so I can then join the top and bottom and move on to the shurzen. Then I can give it an undercoat and deal to any areas that the undercoat highlights as needing attention.
Looks great, did you add details inside the commander copula?
I’m doing the hatch at the moment, building up the head pad and adding the catches. I didn’t bother with any of the insides as the figure I plan on using will pretty much fill the cupola. Once he’s together I may look at adding detail in front of himfor the vision blocks etc but that will depend on just how much can be seen.