1/35 M70A2 Krueger MBT, Desert Storm, 1991

[Guest]

With the interim Ki-43 finished and the temperatures back to a tolerable level in my hobby room, I finally managed to do some more work on the M70A2. It doesn’t look like much, but quite a lot of staring at photos and other thought had to go into parts of it:

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These are the main bits for the remote-control AA turret. As shown earlier, I’ll replace the cannon by an M85 machine gun, and on the left is the basis of the mounting for that. I built a cradle from plastic strip, after sawing away parts of the trunnions (the big cylindrical things), because Dragon had got them somewhat wrong: on the real thing, only the top is as wide as the model portrays it, while the bottom is mostly open. I also added a bit of detail into the left-hand one, which I think is a device to measure the elevation and feed it back to the fire control system. This whole mounting still needs quite a lot of additions, mainly an ammo bin underneath, probably also a spent casings bin (as I don’t think they’d want those to just drop into the turret), and ammo feed chutes, plus the elevation motor and some cabling. Dragon omitted all of this, despite it being very visible

The other bit is the turret, with internal detailing that Dragon similarly omitted entirely. There are two small bins of some kind — their purpose escapes me — plus lifting hooks and a traverse motor. I also closed the opening for the 20 mm barrel with a piece of plastic card that I then shaped to conform to the rest of the turret before cutting a much smaller slot for the M85’s barrel.

Getting there, slowly but surely

[Guest]

This turret is turning out to be the most work of the whole model.

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The ammo/spent casings bins are at the top, made from part of the drive shaft tunnel from a Hobby Boss M706 armoured car (I hadn’t fitted the interior) plus some bits of plastic card and strip.

The other two things are the ammo feed chutes, which are pieces of plastic strip about 4 mm wide and 1 mm thick that I cut from sheet and then bent into shape after heating them with an 800 W hair dryer. I then laboriously glued pieces of 0.25 by 0.5 mm strip to them to replicate the links on the outside (I’m glad I invested in a Chopper ages ago), with scribed lines on the inside. They’re too long so I could hold them in locking tweezers, and will of course be cut to size later.

The main things left to build at this stage are a framework to hold the bins under the turret, brackets for the chutes, a cloth extension to the ejection chute, and cabling to link the various electric bits. Oh, and I also need to add a motor and some kind of pulley system to cock the gun, plus a similar mechanism to operate the trigger. This requires a bit more thought, though.

[Guest]

The upper mounting is now complete, as far as I’m concernedm

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I glued the gun into the mounting and then the chutes to both. On the underside, I added a motor (parts from the Dragon kit, for what I think is the cocker for the Rh 202 cannon) with some scratchbuilt stuff like a pulley at the back and a stretched sprue cable to represent the mechanism to remotely cock the gun.

I just realised it still needs a firing mechanism hooked up to the little lever on the right rear side of the receiver.

[scottie3158]

Jakko,
That is absolutely superb.

[Guest]

Thanks, but it’s not that good, really

Also, here’s a hopefully interesting little film I just came across:

This is German KPz 70 prototype PT 3 under test, mostly driving a cross-country course but also nice shots of its engine (the MTU one, PT 3 was the first equipped with that) being changed by a Bergepanzer 2. (You can tell it’s PT 3 because of the grilles on the rear hull sides — to the best of my knowledge, it was the only one that had those.)

[Guest]

Of course, when you think said you’re done, you remember there’s more to add:

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Aside from the firing mechanism, which I made by just gluing a piece of some or another leftover kit part to the underside of the mounting with more stretched sprue up to the trigger lever, I had forgotten I also needed to add electrical wiring. So that required a distributor-type thing (also on the real gun, but not in the location where I put mine) and copper wire for cables. The thick one running off to the bottom of the mount is supposed to represent the power supply cable, and is the same as the others except wrapped in very thin wire. It won’t go anywhere, just run out of sight Then there’s the rectangular funnel-like things at the bottoms of the chutes, which are just more plastic strip filed and scraped into shape.

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This is both parts of the turret. To the lower part, I added a power cable too, running to behind where the upper part attaches so it also won’t actually go anywhere but look like it does. The struts are plastic strip, with a triangular frame at the bottom, and the ammo box glued straight to those. I’ll leave the parts separate until after painting, so I can just stick the lids onto the turret and spray it with the rest of the model. The upper mounting needs to be black while the turret is to be green (on the inside anyway). Only after all that will I add the ammo belt and the lower half of the spent casings chute.

Here is the lower part in the main turret:

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[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Well, like Scottie, I also think it is superb :tongue-out:
Jim

[Guest]

I’m calling the build done, so it’s on to the painting. Here’s an overview of the model in its unpainted state first, though:

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The wheels are missing because they’re still on the sprue.

I then gave all the pieces except the tracks and wheels a coat of Games Workshop Corax White primer from an aerosol can:

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This turned up a few small defects that I need to fix before I can starting properly painting, so that will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

[scottie3158]

I’m calling the build done, so it’s on to the painting. Here’s an overview of the model in its unpainted state first, though:

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The wheels are missing because they’re still on the sprue.

I then gave all the pieces except the tracks and wheels a coat of Games Workshop Corax White primer from an aerosol can:

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This turned up a few small defects that I need to fix before I can starting properly painting, so that will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Jakko, looking good.

[Guest]

I put on a coat of forest green yesterday evening, the first time I tried using Mig paint (no. 065). It seems to spray well enough, though I’m not all that impressed with it.

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As you can see, I sprayed the sides and underside of the hull, the backs of the wheels and side skirts, the inside of the remote turret and a few more bits. Basically, everything that would be out of reach of the spray gun when overpainting the real tank, plus the outer sides of a few of the wheels so they can represent replacements.

Also, I sprayed the inside of the well for the remote turret white, as it has that colour on the KPz 70 prototype I used photos of to detail the turret. However, it looks like this paint has made the fit so tight that i almost couldn't get the turret off the model anymore. I’ll have to scrape it out before fitting it for real after painting.

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
That is a great, super detailed model. Glad to see the painting started.
It is so annoying when a perfect fit becomes a tight fit after a couple of coats of paint.
Jim

[Guest]

And here it is with a coat of Mission Models MMP-038 US Desert Tan Modern 2 FS 33446:

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[Guest]

I finally got round to doing more work on this one, starting with adding some shading around the detail:

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I’ve only done the front of the hull, and so still need to do everything behind the turret ring, the suspension, the turret and the mine plough. The technique I used was to wet the area with white spirit using a big brush, then flowing thinned enamel paint into the edges with a fine brush. The paint I used for this was somewhat elderly:

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Humbrol No. 72 Matt Khaki Drill, a tin from probably the 1970s but new enough that it has a number and not a letter-number code (for the real old-timers, this colour used to be HM8 ).

[Guest]

Heh, only a bit over two years before I got back to this. Must be a new record for me (in terms of how short this was ). The other day, I began by highlighting the centres of the various panels by spraying a pale tan into them, mixed from a light sand colour and white:

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I’ve been dissatisfied with the Mig Forest Green I used on the hull and some other bits ever since I put it on a few years ago. It’s too light and too bright, I think, to use as US Forest Green, FS 34079, which it does seem to want to be. I did some digging today and learned that Humbrol 116 is apparently a decent match for the real colour, and I happen to have a tin of it. So, I decided to brush-paint the green parts that are or may be visible on the finished model with it. See the difference:

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[Guest]

Once the green had dried, I applied an overall wash of a dark tan colour over the tank. Two years ago, I originally began lining in the detail using Humbrol 72, but it’s a technique I don’t particularly like because it’s so laborious and hard to feather the shadows into the rest of the paintwork. This time round, after the highlighted panels I decided to mix up a similar colour from three parts Vallejo US Field Drab and two parts Hataka MRG Stone, liberally thinned with water and applied as a wash over the whole model:

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Unfortunately, with such washes you need to be careful of build-up along lower edges, and I wasn’t careful enough:

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That will need to be fixed, of course. First, though, I decided to drybrush the whole model with a pale sand colour, Army Painter Skeleton Bone, to create highlights:

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While I had that out, I very heavily drybrushed — almost wet-brushed — the affected area, and that luckily got rid of most of the stain:

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The following step was to drybrush the model again, but more lightly, for further highlights. For this I used an old and long discontinued paint, Rackham Noesis White, which is a sandy off-white:

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In the flesh it’s a bit more obvious than it looks in the photo. And I just remembered I forgot to do the side skirts with the second drybrush …