What's on my desk? Part 44.
Hello again,
We've passed into November now and the temperatures are dropping. Fine weather for modelling though! :-)
The Tortoise has been fighting me almost every step of the way. Don't get me wrong, this is a fine model. It's just the running gear that's a pain to assemble. This is what we mean when we talk about the 'engineering' of a kit. You basically need three hands with 10 fingers each to assemble the suspension units of this kit...
So. First things first. I got all eight units assembled, then painted the tires on every wheel (all 56 of them). Next step was to scrape off some paint, which caused some of the assemblies to, well... disassemble themselves.
Once all the units were attached to the hull, I thought the difficult part would be over, and I moved on to the tracks. Looking at photos of the remaining vehicle at Bovington Tank Museum, the tracks looked pretty well maintained (obviously, for a museum vehicle). I decided to paint them in Ammo Polished Metal, and give them a light dusting later on.
The tracks come on 3 sprues, I primed and airbrushed them in place, then cut out 62 for each side.
The instructions tell you to 'cement tracks quickly and finish shaping before cement dries up'. Fair. I've done this before with Panzer IV tracks. You prepare everything, glue every link with Tamiya Extra Thin, wait a minute and then wrap the tracks around the wheels. Works like a charm. Keep your road wheels loose, and you can then take off the tracks (when the glue dries, they'll hold their shape), paint them separately and re-assemble. Easy!
Except on the Tortoise, these tracks are 1/ three times as big as Panzer IV tracks, 2/ they were already painted, 3/ there's no nub or pin to hold the tracks even loosely together and 4/ the track guards are fixed, so you need to thread the track in between that guard and the wheels first. Oh, and the drive sprocket is very loose (needing to be sandwiched in between the hull and armor plate), so you get zero support from it.
So, inevitably, disaster struck:
That's right, not only did the tracks continually fall apart, one of the suspension units also spontaneously decided to let go.
At this point I just gave up on doing a clean build and broke out the superglue. I don't like using superglue on plastic (you basically have to use it for photo etch), because it inevitably gets messy. In the end I got one side of the tank to look like this:
Doesn't look like much, so forearmed with this knowledge, I cemented all the still-moving wheels on the other side, superglued the bottom run together and the 4-5 links wrapped around the sprocket and idler, then only needed to fit the 7-8 links in between the bottom run and idler/sprocket. In the end, this side looks a lot cleaner:
What about the top runs? Doesn't matter, because the whole assembly is then sandwiched between armor plates, like so:
So, a lot of work for a whole lot of nothing. :-)
Granted, a lot of the trouble could have been avoided if I hadn't painted everything beforehand. Modelling cement and paint don't mix well. On the other hand, painting after assembly would have equally been a nightmare. That's always a consideration you need to make. "Do I make painting easier or do I want a hassle-free construction?" You don't always know the right choice beforehand. That's what the internet is for! There's always going to be someone who had the same struggle and can dispense advice. Like this blog is doing! :-)
In between the cement drying and the cursing over all the damn things constantly falling apart, I managed to get started on the superstructure. The barrel is in one piece, with four sprue attachment points, so I sanded everything smooth and then attached the two-piece muzzle brake and fixed the mantlet in the casemate, which is a very large one piece mold, only needing the back wall as a separate part. There's some nice armour texture here as well.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the build now. I got a Voyager PE update set for this one, so that will be fun...ish.
That's it.
See you next week!