Here's my AFV Club M109A2, built out of the box. The tracks will be AFV Club's indy links, but I haven't built them yet.

Paint was done free hand with Tamiya's Nato colors, black, brown, and green. I had previously bought the "J's Work Masks" for this camo, but they're useless if you've started to attach the many bits that bolt onto the hull and turret, so I had to do free hand. I did use the masks for the road wheels as the M109 demarcation between the wheel and tire is very soft. The masks weren't the perfect diameter, so if you look really closely, you can see they aren't perfect. Hopefully the weathering process will hide that a bit.

Right now it's got a coat of Future on it, hence the shiny/odd appearance. Decals went on tonight, but haven't been sealed. Then I'll start the detail painting, and weathering, along with building the tracks.














Thanks for looking!

Hi Jesse,

that's a real beauty so far!! Looking forward to seeing further steps!

Great show!

Cheers

Romain

Very nice. Great job om the NATO camo.

Thanks for the info along the way on this one!

Excellent paint job Jesse! Thats one kit thats on my 2014 must have list. Well done sir.

Very nice and the camo looks great, I must admit I have always wanted to build one of these as well!

Thanks guys!

Last night I got some solid time at the bench. Tracks are assembled, but not painted, and a lot of the detail painting is finished. I'll try to post some pictures tonight.

So I was kinda on a roll, and didn't want to stop to setup the photo booth.

So now we're calling the model itself finished. The tracks aren't glued down yet as it'll get a base next, and I'll set the suspension and get the track sag correct at that point.

The weathering worked out great to subdue the colors a bit. Very nice!

Mario

Thanks Mario! This was my first time doing a NATO camo and weathering it, so it was a bit of learning on the fly.

Nicely done!

Mike

really nice job. What did you use to do the weathering and streaking?

Yew, I have to agree with everybody else. You have done a stellar job on this! Very pleasing to the eye.

I was a tracked vehicle mechanic on M109A1's from 76-79 in Germany. And I got roped into painting some of the 109's and 548's in our battery. This was during the MERDC 4 color cammo scheme days...however, we were only issued Forest Green, Field Drab and Black. We never did get any of the sand color. (anybody else from the 70's recall that?) Your NATO scheme reminds me a lot of how ours looked, the biggest difference being that the NATO brown seems quite a bit "brighter" than our Field Drab.
Anyway, great job here and thanks for sharing your journey with us!!

Weathering was mostly done with AK Interactive products. The pigments are a mixes of various stuff I've picked up in the last few years.

It's pretty straight forward...just trying to mix the various dust/earth/streaking effects in a way that it doesn't look monotone.