M911 & M747 on Civvie street

[Beekster]

Looks like the beast it is when finished, Mence!  Did you make any tweaks to yours; any helpful hints before I find out the hard way about how not to do something?

[Mence]

Feb 16, 2019 8:45:03 GMT -6 Beekster said:

Looks like the beast it is when finished, Mence!  Did you make any tweaks to yours; any helpful hints before I find out the hard way about how not to do something?

Not really, the kit has very few vices. Fit all the way through was pretty much spot on

Built OOTB, no Aftermarket.

The only bit i struggled with was the PE shroud and brackets round the exhaust stack.

[Beekster]

Did you try to plumb the thing like I'm attempting to do? While it will certainly add realism, it is also something of a headache. I too haven't found any serious fit issues, though it looks like the radiator attachment is a bit hokey, pinned top (inside the hood/bonnet) and bottom (frame). I will add shims on the bottom so that it sits on a more firm foundation. That ought to make test-fitting the cab easier when that time comes. I've found the battery box brackets to be fiddly, and the instructions there suspect...the bend lines for the etch on parts 19 and 20 seem reversed, but I used them as directed anyway. With the next one, I'll switch locations of those two and the bends should be tighter. There's another trick with those that I'll document here later this weekend...

Speaking of plumbing, that battery box needs cables and they run through the forward bracket, so I'll show how that works when I've got it done. There's also a fuel line with a stop-cock fitting that is missing from the fuel tanks, but it's easy to fix.

I wish there was some aftermarket for this kit, frankly. Since I paint with enamels, I would rather not have vinyl tires and prefer plastic tire halves or resin copies. No such luck for this kit. I do have a full resin set in the stash for my M1070, though.

[Dukemaddog]

Oh man, you guys are killing me! I so want this model! Beekster, I know you won't want to wait, but sometime later I'm certain someone will come out with an aftermarket set. As of now; this kit is too new, the right aftermarket producers haven't gotten this kit built yet to see what would best be made.

Looking forward to seeing more.

[Beekster]

Well, I have found the frustration point with this kit and that will delay things. The etched brass brackets for the battery box are proving very fiddly indeed, and I will try one more time to get the battery box on once the brackets have cured on the frame rails. If that doesn't go well (and I'm not particularly hopeful), I will pull all three of them off, measure them, and make new brackets from .015" plastic strip instead. Sure, the brass has a better scale effect...but if the assembly won't stay together and survive the handling necessary to continue construction then it's a fool's errand to make the parts that way. I tried to give myself some adjustment room by gluing some .005" plastic to the brass bits so that the attachment points for the frame rails and battery box would be plastic-to-plastic joints. No joy; the brass just breaks off from the plastic stock. I'll try again tomorrow to get the box on, and if it doesn't look spectacular I'll just make my own and move on.

[Beekster]

No, I won't try again tomorrow. I call this a redemption, of sorts. Behold the image below:

I decided not to mess around with the brass any more and started fabricating parts from plastic. In the foreground you can see the brass brackets, and the plastic ones I'm fabricating. The bases are already on the frame rails, with three bolt heads each yet to be added. You may be able to see three little holes in the brass bits, those fit over three rounded nubbins on the frame rails to secure and align them. Those nubbins are now gone and the base plates added in their place. Just behind the brackets you see the battery box with etched brass ends and step added. Yes, that's solder you see holding the step on, and yes, I did that after the sides were glued to the box! Wet Kleenex makes a good heat sink...almost good enough. No, no damage to the box. But the heat softened the superglue so the completed brass assembly came off. No big deal; clean up the residue and glue it back on again.

Up next, that fuel line fitting I was mentioning earlier:

Pretty simple construction, and though it's probably fragile the plastic handle is probably more likely to stay on than a brass bit would have. If I've got time tomorrow, I'll finish the brackets and get them on the frame. When finished, the only way to tell that I made plastic ones would be to measure their thickness. I used .015" stock; the brass is .008". Your eyes are more perfectly calibrated than mine if you can really see the difference.

[BUCKY]

Nice way to overcome a bad situation! Looks good, bro!

[Beekster]

Bucky, this is one of my pet peeves with modern modeling: Brass parts in profusion because they're perceived to be cool. I can be a perfect-to-scale rivet counter with the best of them, but this is an example where the "perfect" scale choice, along with some iffy design decisions, makes for assembly headaches. Plastic parts aren't quite so true to scale, but the difference isn't obvious and the assembly task is easier. What's more, with an assembly like this brass is actually more fragile! Why? It's the superglue and the metal. Superglue has no flexibility, and neither does the metal. Push it, and the metal bends and stays bent and the glue joint probably breaks. Plastic parts have some inherent give to them, so when bumped they will flex a bit and return to their previous location. That's much easier to live with as the project progresses. But because most modelers think that brass is always the bee's knees and inherently better than plastic, manufacturers load kits up with the stuff without thinking about whether the fidelity of detail is worth the effort. Think about this: At .008" thick, these brass parts scale out at over a quarter of an inch thick in 1/35 scale. That's not sheet metal; that's thin armor plate! You can't make brackets like this true to scale, so why try when doing so makes the modeler's job harder? Shep Paine had it right when describing his "creative gizmology" for adding detail: It looks good and convincing, and generates 90% of the effect of a perfectly accurate thing with 10% of the effort. Plastic brackets in this case achieve that same objective, despite being overscale.

My other pet peeve is the rush to acrylic paint and the demise of enamels, but going off on that would hijack my own thread...

[JCON]

Works for this guy!!! Well done!!!

[BUCKY]

Sometimes, to my eye, proper scale size doesn't look right. I build 1/25 scale stuff, and to make a 100 foot tall tree would not look right. It would be around 48 inches tall! Even a 20 foot tree is 9 5/8"!

[RLFoster]

Excellent plastic work! Looking very good indeed!!

[Mence]

Nice additions.

While i think P.E. adds a certain level of finesse, I agree with your comments. Probably why I like Tamiya afmour kits so much, styrene and not much else!

[Beekster]

Feb 17, 2019 8:03:44 GMT -6 Mence said:

Nice additions.

While i think P.E. adds a certain level of finesse, I agree with your comments. Probably why I like Tamiya afmour kits so much, styrene and not much else!

True.  I've never built a Tamiya kit that fit poorly anywhere. I don't have a huge amount of Tamiya in my stash only because I'm a Sherman guy and most of their Sherman kits are sourced from other producers, some better (Asuka) than others (Italeri).  Their new M10 kits are superb, despite a parts breakdown that makes fitting a proper interior more difficult than it ought to be.  Their IDF M51 is the best M51 kit out there period; the only kit with a proper muzzle brake.  I only wish Tamiya had chosen the ventilated version of the engine deck, but that can be dealt with be scratchbuilding, too.

Etched brass is great for parts like engine deck intakes and the like, and sometimes for fenders where the ability to dent and crumple it in ways plastic can't be mangled is better for certain artistic presentations.  I just don't like it being used for structural members.

[dogfish7 (R.I.P.)]

Your detail work is over the top Beekster.

[JCON]

Agreed!!!

[ogrejohn]

That sure is some nice work! 

[Beekster]

Thank you, gents! I've said this before and I'll say it again: This sort of detailing is the kind of work ANY of you can do. I've seen your skills here, and this is well within your skill set. Stuff like the extra fuel fittings is mostly a matter of reference material. The bracket replacements are more a function of tools. For those, I'm really only using three capital equipment tools beyond the hand tools we all have: A digital caliper to measure dimensions accurately; a NorthWest Short Line Chopper II to cut styrene stock, and a NorthWest Short Line True Sander to ensure that parts are square and dial in dimensions. Take those brackets, for example: The Chopper II cut to size the .015" x .060" stock for the frame bits, the six longer pieces for the long sides that make the "L" shape, and the smaller rectangular pieces to make the angled parts. Those last were cut from .015" x .156" strip, and the True Sander finessed them down to the .143" width I needed. The caliper again measured out where I would make the angled cut, and that was done with a hobby knife. Once the first one was done, it became a template for the other two and a spare just in case. The right tools make this sort of work a breeze. Once you start working with strip & rod stock to make parts like this, you very quickly develop the eye for looking at an object and working out how many parts you need to build it. The measuring and fabrication are straightforward after that.

[JCON]

Very true Beekster!!!

[JED]

Coming alone nicely,loving the extra detailing too

[Dukemaddog]

Feb 16, 2019 21:40:01 GMT -6 Beekster said:

Bucky, this is one of my pet peeves with modern modeling: Brass parts in profusion because they're perceived to be cool. I can be a perfect-to-scale rivet counter with the best of them, but this is an example where the "perfect" scale choice, along with some iffy design decisions, makes for assembly headaches. Plastic parts aren't quite so true to scale, but the difference isn't obvious and the assembly task is easier. What's more, with an assembly like this brass is actually more fragile! Why? It's the superglue and the metal. Superglue has no flexibility, and neither does the metal. Push it, and the metal bends and stays bent and the glue joint probably breaks. Plastic parts have some inherent give to them, so when bumped they will flex a bit and return to their previous location. That's much easier to live with as the project progresses. But because most modelers think that brass is always the bee's knees and inherently better than plastic, manufacturers load kits up with the stuff without thinking about whether the fidelity of detail is worth the effort. Think about this: At .008" thick, these brass parts scale out at over a quarter of an inch thick in 1/35 scale. That's not sheet metal; that's thin armor plate! You can't make brackets like this true to scale, so why try when doing so makes the modeler's job harder? Shep Paine had it right when describing his "creative gizmology" for adding detail: It looks good and convincing, and generates 90% of the effect of a perfectly accurate thing with 10% of the effort. Plastic brackets in this case achieve that same objective, despite being overscale.

My other pet peeve is the rush to acrylic paint and the demise of enamels, but going off on that would hijack my own thread...

Preach it Brutha! I agree with this totally, including the acrylic to enamel issue.

I also will fashion parts out of plastic instead of using certain P/E parts, especially when a kit tells me to replace or enhance something with a metal rod. Plastic is so much easier to work with.

Everything you are doing is excellent so far. Keep going and stay the course. This is looking fantastic already! Bring it on man!