Great work Jakko. Will best the suspension assembly process in mind when I get to mine!
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Jakko,
That did make me laugh out loud with your method of weight calculation.
Make sure that the winch frame is really dry and secure before testing/attaching the bridge. On my original I did not leave it to dry out thouroghly and as soon as I let the winch take the weight, the bridge pulled it off the frame. Luckily it was only a case of glue and wait.
Cheers
Mike.Comment
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I don’t have him, so sorry, no … I would have added Rincewind and/or Death, but these four were enough already
And well, I also have Detritus, who I put on the rear of the tank first, but he seemed to be clearly too much. When I weighed him after taking the photo of the scales above, he turned out to be about 230 g, IIRC.
It’s really not that difficult, but you need to keep your eyes open to get it all on straight.
Goal achieved
TBH, I first wanted to use some other stuff, but then my eye caught those figures that have stood un-, half-, and nearly fully painted on my workbench for years and I thought: if I’m going to take a photo of it anyway, why not?
Good point, I had thought of that too already, but it bears repeating. This is also why I glued the front support to the tank yesterday evening but waited until this afternoon to work out the counterweight … um … weight. These things need to be fairly strong, and you don’t want them being pushed out of true or pulled off the model because the glue hasn’t dried enough yet.Comment
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At the rear hull, I decided to first add part of the waterproofing gear that AFV Club didn’t include:
[ATTACH]477832[/ATTACH]
This was done by glueing pieces of 0.5 mm plastic card into the openings, then taking slightly smaller pieces of 1.5 mm card and filing their edges and corners to a slope. The tape-like stuff over them is my old standby, Tamiya Pla-Paper, paper-thin plastic card that I cut into strips and glued in place with a lot of liquid cement. The lower towing eyes have got a small plug in them, which I made by punching a 1.4 mm disc from some plastic card.
All of this is pretty much exactly as per the official instructions, because when I had the idea to build an AVRE with a fascine as used at Westkapelle about a year and a half ago, I contacted Peter Brown (who used to write plenty of articles about British vehicles and units in Military Modelling) to ask if he had information on the deep-wading gear. He obliged me by sending a scan of a British Army manual titled 6-ft Wading Instructions for Churchill I–VI which has the exact procedures for making the real tank watertight Here are the relevant images for this part:
[ATTACH]477831[/ATTACH]
Two metal lids, seen in the top picture, have Cordtex (detonating cord) with an electrical detonator taped inside of them, the lids are then welded to the tank (not all the way around, just enough to keep them on) and the seams are then closed with contact cement, watertight tape and what I think is a kind of liquid sealant. The detonator is wired to the tank’s tail light (!) so that the covers can be blown off the tank after landing, simply by flipping the light switch.Comment
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Coming on nicely Jakko she very good of him to share that with you.Comment
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Aside from the articles he wrote, I only know him through Missing-Lynx, but he seems a friendly enough person
When I was working on those panels yesterday evening, as I set down the model on my workbench at one point, both wheels of No. 10 suspension arm on the left-hand side broke off — almost certainly because the model has all that weight in the back now and its front suspension raised, so without the bridge, all of it leans on stations 9 and 10. First thing I did this afternoon, as far as this model is concerned anyway, is make something to avoid that happening again:
[ATTACH]477872[/ATTACH]
Just a piece of 2 cm thick styrofoam, about as long as the hull floor and wide enough that it wedges between the wheels. The model now sits flat on that instead of on its rear wheels.
That done, I continued work on the hull top:
[ATTACH]477871[/ATTACH]
As an aside, in step 1 you have to drill holes through the sponson sides for the conical bolt heads and some of the AVRE fittings. The bolt heads need 1.5 mm holes, but the AVRE fittings (parts M11, L5 and L6 — I prefer L7 myself ) are a very tight fit then, so I drilled their holes out to 1.6 mm and they went on fine. Also, the easiest way to add the bolt heads is to just pick one up with a moist fingertip, push it into place, and run some liquid cement around it.
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Once you get the track on it will spread the weight....Aside from the articles he wrote, I only know him through Missing-Lynx, but he seems a friendly enough person :smiling3:
When I was working on those panels yesterday evening, as I set down the model on my workbench at one point, both wheels of No. 10 suspension arm on the left-hand side broke off — almost certainly because the model has all that weight in the back now and its front suspension raised, so without the bridge, all of it leans on stations 9 and 10. First thing I did this afternoon, as far as this model is concerned anyway, is make something to avoid that happening again:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]n[/ATTACH]
Just a piece of 2 cm thick styrofoam, about as long as the hull floor and wide enough that it wedges between the wheels. The model now sits flat on that instead of on its rear wheels.
That done, I continued work on the hull top:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]n[/ATTACH]
As an aside, in step 1 you have to drill holes through the sponson sides for the conical bolt heads and some of the AVRE fittings. The bolt heads need 1.5 mm holes, but the AVRE fittings (parts M11, L5 and L6 — I prefer L7 myself ) are a very tight fit then, so I drilled their holes out to 1.6 mm and they went on fine. Also, the easiest way to add the bolt heads is to just pick one up with a moist fingertip, push it into place, and run some liquid cement around it.
Mike.Comment
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That’s what I’m counting on, yes It will also have the model resting on seven wheels per side instead of two, so all should be good. Until then, though, I’ll keep this styrofoam under the model for as long as possible.
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I began adding the waterproofing tape over the engine and transmission hatches:
[ATTACH]477907[/ATTACH]
However, to do the latter, I also needed to add the rear mudguards, and to add those, you need to add at least the centre section (next to the turret) and everything behind it, because the centre one is the only one that has positive location (because it sits against the turret ring). And then, you might as well add all of them.
By the way, for anyone else wanting to waterproof a Churchill, the tape on the transmission deck and the right rear engine hatch was only applied shortly before boarding the landing craft. If you’re portraying the model as being prepared before that time, the tape there should be left off.Comment
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That bit about the waterproofing being "blown" off by switching on the tail lights - quite a unique method.
Isn't it nice when someone who knows is happy to share that knowledge.
Model is coming on a treat.Comment
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I'm liking the use of the large hammer on that lead sheet !
Very detailed explanation of the build as usual .Comment
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I like the pragmatic solutions they came up with for things like this. The rear waterproofing is blown off with the tail light switch, that on the hull front with an adapter plugged into the instrument panel, and on the turret it used the switch for the turret spotlight. The instructions stress that all of these must be taped over when they’re in their “off” position before the Cordtex is installed
Better on that than on the model
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Over the past few days I have been thinking a fair amount about how to replicate the asbestos compound (…!) that some seams were waterproofed with, mainly the ones where tape appears to not have been possible to use. What I eventually came up with is this:
[ATTACH]478015[/ATTACH]
Extra-heavy acrylic medium, which is normally used to add texture to paintings or to thicken paint for certain effects in those. By applying it with a fairly fine brush, I could get it into the seams fairly well:
[ATTACH]478016[/ATTACH]
Though it’s still drying in that photo, and usually shrinks when it does so, so I may have to repeat parts of it later. I still need to do other hatches and things that were also to be sealed this way.
In the mean time, I also started on the turret:
[ATTACH]478017[/ATTACH]
First, I scraped away the moulding seams on the turret walls and attempted to restore the texture by softening the plastic with liquid cement and then stippling with a stiff brush. That done, I built a rough replica of the kit’s petard mortar from some 7 mm tube, 18 mm long, and a piece of 3 mm sprue. The sprue attaches inside the tube with some piece of scrap I found that fit nicely, and I glued a piece of plastic card inside the turret and drilled a hole for the sprue in that. The distance between the card and the tube is 11 mm.
“WTF?! That kit includes a very nice mortar!” Yes, it does. But I don’t like wasting those extremely well-moulded parts on something that will be wrapped up entirely in canvas
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As well as painting more acrylic gel medium onto the model, I also built the winch:
[ATTACH]478104[/ATTACH]
It’s loose on the tank here, and is also missing half of the winch drum because 55 cm of thread for lifting the bridge must be attached to it, and I don’t want it in the way.
Note the ammo box on the mudguard, which you can see in one of the photos of the real tank I posted earlier. It’s an old Verlinden part I happened to find when rummaging through a drawer full of British ammo boxes
The little device in the middle of the engine deck is the release gear for the wading trunks, to which the cables that hold them in place will be attached later.
Edit: Forgot to mention last night that the two white pieces in the winch are 1 mm plastic rod, because cutting those was quicker than cleaning up the kit parts that go there.Comment
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