Sorry, no pics tonight, but i will get some up tommorow morning. for now all i can do is tell you that i have fitted the toolbox, ice cleat straps, tow cable and a few other bits and bobs. i have just finished assembing the main pieces of the turret. I masked off the turret and used milliput thinned with water to make the casting seam. i also used milliput to fix the metal barrel which is too small for a good fit. i found that if i put my desk lamp so it touched the end of the barrel the heat was conducted to the milliput without melting the plastic parts. In this way i was able to make the milliput set in 5 minutes where it would have taken several hours before.

ok here are some pics as promised, athough a little late. So far i have finished the building apart from the bedsprings and the running gear which i will attach after painting.

Very nice looking model! Keep it coming and I'm curious how it turns out, but so far it looks great and clean...

Any ideas for the groundwork yet?

yes. it will be very similar to this photo, with the tank climbing over a pile of rubble.

it will be surrounded by figures and i have build a small corner of a building for the dio too, which can be seen in my dio build log here

i will probably begin painting at the weekend, but i am still unsure about decals. currently i only have 3 pictures of t34's with bedspring armour, ans two of them are of the same tank. If anyone knows of any photos at all of a T34 with bedspring armour please could you post them or point me in the right direction. It seems strange that dragon would release a 'Bedspring' kit, which actually offers only one decal option for a bedspring variant, for which the kit has the wrong wheels. perhaps there really are only 3 photos.

Hi Luke,

maybe this



or this one may help?



So, at least 3/4 pics of T 34 with "bedspring" armor, but definitly the wrong roadwheels on three of them...

Keep us informed ;-)

V

wow thanks Volker. I'm afraid Ales beat you to it with the top right photo (which i had not seen until a few days ago), but the second pic i have never seen before. where did you find it? So far the top right pic is the only one with the right wheels but i can't quite make out the markings.

You're welcome

Unfortnunatly the only pic I have found, showing the "right" wheels is indeed not very informative as far as markings are concerned. It looks a little like the common white band and a single number (probably '5'). Maybe a tank from another unit therefore?

Well, where did I found those pics? Indeed I dont remember. As soon as I find a pic that may be of interest for me, I try to save this to my HDD, because much to often really good places in the internet are closing down, thereby many good pics etc. disappear somewhere in the cyberspace...

And when somebody needs such info, he's welcomed

Best wishes

V

Hi Luke,

Maybe this pic can help. It has the right road wheels and it looks like it may be from the same unit as the one from the pics Volker posted earlier.



Most of its screens have been torn away but if you look closely you can still see two. It has the well know Berlin white stripe with the number "09" in large (I’m not sure if there is a third digit behind the standing tanker) and smaller "23" just above the stripe (at least I think its "23", since additional digits could be hidden behind the tanker).

Hope this helps.

Jon

Thanks for the pic Jon. My wheels are half spider ones. the front wheel in the pic is half spider, but the rest are full spider ones. this doesn't bother me too much, but the bloke blocking the first number means i have a problem. does anyone know what the numbers refer to? can we work out what the first one was?

I would say that is "238" to me...note that the partialy obscured 3 in the center...and I say its a 3 because of the space between the top and bottom curve..compare to the 3 in the photo posted above.
and I think the last digit is an 8 because it looks like both the bottom and top are complete loops that are starting to curve into the center..forming an 8.
So that would indicate a tank of the same unit.
Andy

thanks Andy that quite helpful. To anyone who has been reading this, i hadn't given up on this build. I have just been building a new desk because working over a chest of drawers was making my back ache too much. Hopefully i can paint the wheel rims today. I already made a little jig for quickly airbrushing the inner wheel which i will show you later.

here's a load of pics again. i will try to get back to uploading pics daily but at the moment i haven't really had the chance. the bedsprings are all done now, and it just remains to attach the tracks before i can call the building part done. i have painted the wheel rims and i am now just waiting until i can get some paint and get the base coat on, hopefully later today. I also threw some pics of my new work bench set up which will hopefully make it a lot easier for me to work on this.

here's a load of pics again. i will try to get back to uploading pics daily but at the moment i haven't really had the chance. the bedsprings are all done now, and it just remains to attach the tracks before i can call the building part done. i have painted the wheel rims and i am now just waiting until i can get some paint and get the base coat on, hopefully later today. I also threw some pics of my new work bench set up which will hopefully make it a lot easier for me to work on this.

Looking good Luke. Its got a very cool battle-weary look already. Should look great painted up.

well i was just browsing through the pics i have and i noticed something. If you campare these two pics, looking at the ground around them, you can see that they are in exactly the same position for both photos. If you look in the background you can see a bloke standing on a tank, again in both photos. that coupled with the fact that there isn't much track sag suggests to me that the pics were taken by the same cameraman as the tanks arrived at the bradenburger tor in unison.


now if you compare the number 3 in both markings to the obscured middle number in this pic, you get a good match, and this means the last number must be 8.

this means we now have a full platoon; 230,235 and 238, of the 2nd company. This doesn't help me a lot, but I just thought it might be of interest to someone that the 3rd platoon of the 2nd company used bedsprings and all 3 vehicles survived the war.

I apologise for not having uploaded any pics recently but this does not mean that i have stopped or given up on this build. in fact, i completed it earlier today. I promise that i will upload a whole bunch of photos that i took during the painting process tommorow, as well as some high quality shots which i will enter in the coming DMoM contest.

Luke

ok here are the pics, a little later than promised. i'm not sure if my photobucket account has a daily upload cap so i might wait until tommorow until uploading the final pics, but here is how i got there...

Love it...you built a great T-34. The bedspring armor is superb. Looking forward to more pics of the finished result.

Great work, Luke. I especially like the overall rusty & dusty look. The rubble base would be next, I presume...

VERY NICE! It has that worn and beatin' look about it and looking like the real thing.

thanks. The next stage is to sort out the rubble for the diorama. I already have a building but it looks a bit out of scale so i might make a new one. I also have 12 figures to assemble which might take a while. all this will be on my dio build log which i linked earlier on this one.

Luke-- great job! A true work of art.
DJ

Your model made me wanna get one too. That's a compliment BTW, great, great job!!! Love it.

John