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.

Partly Scratchbuilt 1:72 Soviet Recovery Tank

I found this interesting article on the website of Henk of Holland (first part can be found on his website, too) and suddenly I knew whats to build next. Actually the this mod was for an Tamiya SU-122 kit in 1:35, but I used my kit of the SU-100 from AER, or was it PST?

Here are some pictures of the almost finished model. There are only some smaller parts to attach, then the kit will get its sealing.

Almost all parts are from the SU-100 kit, the tracks and the saw are from the Revell T-34, the other small parts (pickaxe, cable eyes, hatches) came from Pegasus. All other parts were build from scratch.

I had to correct the positions of the roadwheels, you can find more about this big fault in the kit in the AER T34 kit review at On the way models.
The crane is made from 1mm steel wire, booth parts were connected with heat shrinking tube. The steel wire is actually made of copper wire and the winch is made from plastic card.

I used the same color scheme on this model that I used for my ISU-152.

The last picture show the model while constuction.

Offtopic:

a) I wanted to rework my links and give them an own site but it does not work as I want it, so this operation is moved to the future.

b) This new Blogspot editor sucks. I have some problems with sizing the font. In my view, the option "small" is too small but the option "normal" is too large. I managed it to get the fontsize that I wanted to have.

If the text is too small to read it, you still can use [CTRL] and [+] or [-] to change its size.

Scratchbuilt Handlebars For the Pegasus T34/85

The T34/85 made by Pegasus with some handlebars added. They are made from plastic bristles of a broom. These are easy to bend and gluable with any polystyrene modelling glue,at least the ones I got.
It took about 20 minutes to equip four tanks with these bars.

1:72 Toolset by MACO Modellbau

A closer look at a great addition for models which comes from MACO Modellbau. MACO Modellbau offers this toolset on the picture above as a limited edition. It contains an axe, a shovel, a boltcutter and a pickaxe.

The tools are a great addition to the simple wargamer kits of HÄT and Italeri, and the price is not to beat. You will get 10 sprues of the toolset for only 2 Euros. If you want to buy them you have to be fast because it is a limited edition.

Check out the website of MACO where you will find all other excellent model kits made by MACO and from a lot of other companies, too. You can find the store at http://mc-modellbau.de/

Update 04/2018
http://mc-modellbau.de/ has closed it's gates.

Hen Long 1:72 RC Tiger Minus RC

Remember this post with my Hen Long RC Tigers ?

I wanted to start a little tank battle with a friend, but I had to determine that only one of them functioned, all other Tigers did not work. That sucked. So I made my thoughts how I could recycle them.

The first step was to open them and take out all electronics and gears. Then I used Milliput to close all holes of the leds and switches. After the Milliput was hardened I used a hobby knife and some sanding paper to smooth the surfaces. I took some little plastic pieces for detailing the hatches. The next step was to clean all roadwheels from excess plastic (hm, sometimes I wonder about my English), what took a little more time than I tought.

After glueing all parts together I started with the paint. The base color is GW Codex Grey (#61-52) darkened with black, a fresh pot of grey plus 4 or 5 ml Black, that gave me a fine dark grey. Then came a wash with some selfmixed black ink. The drybrushing was done with Hobbyline Grey (#27) and then I painted some details as the ropes and tools, all with different GW colors.

There are only a few things to do, the tracks will get some color, all tanks will get some decals, and last but not least I have to seal the paint with matte varnish. A friend suggested to give them a winter camo, maybe I will do this.

1:72 Bergepanzer III (Work In Progress)

(too lazy to write today)

HÄT 1:72 Panzer III G conversion

Here are some pictures of my current project. I try to build a Bergepanzer III from a HäT Panzer III G. I removed the turret and built a repair platform from scratch. My only sources were this article and some pictures I found via Google.

The materials I used for it are pieces of cardboard, wooden sticks and some parts from the spare box. The crane was built from different plastic parts.

There is still some work to do. I will add some more details to it and will try to modify the tracks with my method of drilling (see here). I will try another modification which I found at this link.

The wooden platform is finished.

Some self-made rivets were attached.

Tools and equipment are still missing.

The crane will get some more details.

HÄT 1:72 StuH Modifications

I made some more little modifications on my StuH's to make them look better. Maybe other modellers can do it better, but I am happy with them because I am a newbie to modelling.
All materials I was using were from my spare parts and plastic junk box.

The picture below shows a Sturmhaubitze 42 squad for my own Eastern front wargame rules(+scenarios) that I started to write, more will come soon.
Please note, that all tanks are still not finished.

HÄT 1:72 StuH Modifications

I sent this sketch to Mike "The Bunkermaster" 's Blog to publish this. By the way he did. Thanks for that. You can find his blog at http://bunkermeister.blogspot.com/

On both StuH 42 the holes of the roadwheels were opened. The paintjob is very sloppy and not finished yet.