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M16 Multiple Gun Motor Carriage Part Two

Once you have those seats assembled, you need to make two more of those tiny hinges. These are for the front edge of the passenger seat. Once ready, attach to the floor but be sure you have the position correct, the back wall of the fighting compartment has to go behind the seats, flush with the rear edge of the floor; be sure the seats don’t hang over the back.

The sides of the cab have lots and lots of cool stuff to detail too. First thing to do, way before trying to assemble them to the floor pan, is cut those blocks of styrene intended as the jerry can mounts clean off. They’re just wrong. Fill the holes created by this with a piece of the styrene you just cut off, and mud it over with styrene filler putty (I’m using Testors). At this stage I did assemble the sides to the floor pan. With the putty smoothed and sanded flat, then I’m ready for jerry can holders…the bracket is easy and correct, and the Griffon can holder is perfect and correctly to scale. I do both sides of the body and work all the details, using dry time for one thing to work with another, so in this period I assemble the jerry can holders for both sides, then go to work carving all the compromised details stuff off the tools: the mounts and brackets and holders which Dragon just molded on as a lump. Carve it all off and make proper tools of them. Now I’ll give you a tip: there’s a sprue in the Dragon halftrack kits with un-mounted tools, so if you choose to take a faster route, there they are. Personally I like to sculpt. I used the front shovel holder from the Eduard PE set, as I felt it was the more accurate, but everything else on the tool holders is from Griffon. All of the tools are now left loose until the final painting, of course.

A note on WW2 jerry cans: I own some, so I know the size and details. The most accurately scaled jerry cans are by Tamiya from their WW2 Allied Vehicles Accessories kit. In second place are the Dragon jerry cans, which are a mere fraction too small, but not enough to notice. Cans with the screw on caps always had a small chain from the cap center to the can, so I took some extras from the K59 M2HB kits I’d used previously; for me the mount pin chains work beautifully for jerry cans. Your choice: use the Dragon cans, which are the “flip top” type, or the Tamiya cans, which need chains for their screw on caps.

Also done in this phase were all of the tiny handles for the engine covers and the tie downs on the fenders. These are challenging little bits of PE, made quite precisely by Griffon. I work on a wood panel on a drafting table in white formica on a flat tile floor. No carpet demons shall have my PE! I keep a white halogen flashlight there because it makes dropped PE parts just glow when dropped. Some of these handles and tie downs were indeed retrieved using this light.

The armored slat grille was next, and went together trouble free. I used the Eduard cross brace for the radiator as Griffon doesn’t provide one. Moving along, both Griffon and Eduard parts are used for the fender inner details and track well details.