May 1, 2019

More Bitsrecycling
With Instant-Sil

Oops I did it again. Building the Battlefront Miniatures M-901 ITV and LAV tanks left over a load of bits. And as you may know, for me this is annoying, I think it is a waste. Except for the marked pieces all parts of this sprue were leftover once and of this sprue twice.
Sure, sometimes you will get some extra hatches or small parts, but in this case there were so many sparebits leftover, like at the Plastic Soldier Company 1:100 Panzer 38t (these were leftover), that I decided to try to use them like I did in this post.

The main parts were finished and roughly cleaned up. As you may see, the duplicated tracks, skirts and hulls are not perfect but I think they are acceptable. They would look better when builtup and painted.

The quality of the cast could be much better, but with my limited supplies I only got these results. This is how they looked when all parts were attached. Also I had to duplicate the drivers hatch. In the background you can see some of my mates Ollis Leopard 2, this picture was made at another roguish Montagmaler meeting.

Later that day we basecoated more than a dozen tanks via airbrush in a production line that would have made Henry Ford proud of us.

Having a Revell Aquacolor Bronzegrün basecoat, the improvised tanks made a better appearence than thought. On the picture they are flanked left and right by the 1:100 T-55 AM kit by the Plastic Soldier Company, a kit which was also nice to build.


I just made these two pictures, you see my original Battlefront kits of the M-163 and the M-901 side by side with their duplicates. Since I changed my regular matte varnish you can see slight differences in the coloring.
I am happy with them, and their production was pretty simple. Another time I used stuff which would else disappear in the bitsbox. For me, one aspect of modelling was always, that every kit built by every modeller everywhere is a unicate, and these are mine.

And I saved some money for other units, one pack of epoxy putty (2 €) was used for each model, some closer looks at the available French forces for "TANKS The Modern Age" may come in the future, but I am still unsure about that.

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