This has been a pretty great week, especially since I got to spend so much time building at Hobby Day. Almost all the model acquisitions I posted were also gotten at Hobby Day. This is all armor too this time.
First up is my 1/35th scale Patton that I'm building for the SoCal AMPS Group Build. All I did was to apply the decals, starting with the front of the hull:
After that I did the turret decals:
Next were the decals on the side. This is where I nearly lost it. With the exception of the word "Army" every single letter and number was individually printed... even the stinkin' dots that go behind the 'U' and the 'S'!! WHAT?!!!
Seriously, why was it so hard to print them as one big decal? Well, because of that, these are not that that straight and I don't care:
Here is this big beastie all decaled up and ready for the dullcoat, weathering, wheels and tracks:
I did this up as a tank from the 1st of the 69th Armor in honor of a friend of mine who served in that unit and fought at the battle of Ben Het.
Oh man, enough of that! After that I was ready for something simple.
The next thing I did was to finally cement down the cab roof. After that I added a dark brown wash to the D-9 Dozer, and then a black wash to the grilles on it:
It doesn't show well in that pic, but it is there. Yes, I have a bit of touch up painting to do. I'll do that after I dullcoat it.
Next up, I figured if I was going to paint my M-109A6; then I might as well build my M-109A2 and paint it at the same time. I pulled it out and started on it by building the basic hull:
Next I added all the detail parts and the wheels and sprockets:
The turret was next. After I built it and added the gun I placed it on the hull:
Once I get the tracks on that, I'll be able to paint it with my M-109A6. Speaking of the -A6, here they are together:
Next I decided to move forward on my M-32. It was time to do the running gear. For a UM kit, this went better than I expected:
Then I added a photo-etch strip of rivets to the front of the upper hull and dry-fit it to the lower hull to see what adjustments I would need to make. Naturally, it disappeared never to be found again:
Oh well, I then checked the positioning of the mine roller attachment now that I had this up on wheels:
Looking pretty good. Time to set that aside until I can anneal the P/E and add it to the running gear...
That completes what I had going on before Hobby Day, some of that work above was done there too. By that time my Birthday order was in and I took thirty minutes trying to decide what to start first.....
The Master Box Mk I Female tank looked the easiest and since I'd never built a Master Box kit before, I started on that. Despite a slight bit of warpage on the bottom hull floor; this went together very fast and very well. I stopped here before doing the sponsons:
Yeah, that was about five minutes of work....
I love it!
The French APC looked the next simplest to at least start, so I built up the basic hull:
After that, I set that aside to dry and moved on to start the Israeli Nagmashot APC:
I built up the basic hull and added the top pyramid to it to test the fit:
Looked okay, but I needed to do some sanding to make it fit better. Once that was done, I fit that into place. Then I felt it looked too funny so I added the fenders to the sides:
That looks better now. The final model I started was the Armory M-41 Walker Bulldog. Again, the basic hull was assembled first:
Then I did the turret. That was more fiddly than I thought it would be:
Gonna take a bit of cleanup on that turret. After that, I tried to add it to the hull and found that the turret ring was either too thick, or the bar along the bottom was not positioned well to allow the turret to turn because it wouldn't go on. After some careful shaving and finagling, I got it to go on like it's supposed to.
Wow, that turret looks big on that. It'll fall into proportion once I get everything else on.
And that is where I finished for the week. Thanks all for looking in, comments are welcome.