Good morning!
Short week this week. I'm open today (Tuesday) and Wednesday. I'm on leave for the rest of the week and will return for the last day of September: Tuesday 30th.
Lots of fiddly detail done last week. I completed the Bergepanther winch and installed it in the hull. I also made a start on the McLaren.
First things first:
The Bergepanther's winch. This is a giant piece of equipment capable of pulling 40 tons. When you see it in the hull you understand why military recovery vehicles tend to be based on tank chassis (chassises?).
The cable is a meter-long nylon thread. I painted it in Ammo Polished Steel. Wrapping it in and around all the wheels and spools is pretty complicated. Takom doesn't make it any easier as they don't indicate how much of the length needs to go out to the back of the tank. You're supposed to do all the threading and wrapping during the construction of the plastic. In the end I had to unwind everything, guesstimate around 15cm loose wire, and thread the rest through the spools using tweezers... Fiddly work, as I mentioned, but the end result is pretty cool:
After adding the rest of the detail, tightening the thread a bit and repairing some damaged paint, it's ready to install in the hull. You'll notice I painted the winch in
Dark Yellow instead of the cream interior colour:
It's a snug fit! There's two drive shafts on the underside that have to fit into the transmission up front and through the engine firewall in the back. I don't think it's actually possible to fit the winch with both these installed. I had to remove the back one and then reinsert it through the firewall...
A half wall separates the winch from the crew compartment:
The fit is not very good, so I'm leaving it loose until I attach the upper hull, which will hopefully help with aligning everything.
I then started construction on the engine. I've put it in its place for the picture (still unpainted and unfinished, of course). The cooling fans on the right side have been fixed as well.
Finally, I'll show you my method for painting wood planks using oil paint.
We start with a base coat of Dark Yellow (same colour as the winch). I use Burnt Sienna oil paint for the wood. First off, some splotches of paint:
Use a soft brush to spread this out and cover everything:
I then take a crappy brush with stiff bristles and pull lines into the paint, to get a wood grain effect:
Now, wood is a natural material and no two planks will be the same. This is why oil paint is ideal for this effect. You can remove more paint (e.g. using a cotton-bud) to get a lighter wood colour, or add more paint for a darker plank. Adding a few dots of paint and gently wiping these out creates knots in the wood. Also take into account the length of the planks. In this case the middle 8 are full-length while the 8 on the top and bottom are only half. Taking all this into account, here's my first colour pass:
The lower 4 will receive a secondary colour (like Raw Umber) to create even more variation. Looking back, I probably made this wood way too 'warm'. It's perfect for wood flooring, for instance, but for a military vehicle other kinds of wood (with less colour and lower quality) would have been used. A base of
Deck Tan or
Buff can already change the appearance a lot. Using a less red-orange oil paint can cool down the colour even further...
Finally, I started on the McLaren. First off, I primed everything
white and then painted the inner hull
Satin Black. I then installed the front suspension arms:
Should have looked a bit better at the instructions, because I missed that the side panels need to be painted black. No matter, it needs a second coat anyway.
That's it for now.
See you next week (it'll probably be a short one).
