Paul, thanks, and thanks also for the quite difficult questions . . . honestly, I didn't really have a clue what I was letting myself in for. I think I read somewhere that resin can be harder to cast due to issues like bubbles, and also that the mould life might be less due to solvent attack and sticking. That might be totally wrong however, although Nigel Lawton (my casting guru) does talk about the need for bottom up pouring when using resin, which, for a complete beginner like me, looked unecessarily complicated. Totally agree with you about making another mould to cast several at once, and I mentioned earlier that this was my original intention; but after messing up my first mould and having to remake one half (- twice . . . did I admit that before?) I frankly couldn't face making yet another one, and all the time the mould was producing acceptable castings, I just kept pouring. It was OK, I read the paper some evenings, and had the guitar in the kitchen on others for a quick five minute pick while waiting for the metal to cool.

Also, of course you are totally right, the mould isn't latex, it is indeed RTV-101 silicone rubber. Not sure if you've checked out the Nigel Lawton site, but he does recommed a different silicone grade for resin casting. (As an aside, he only went for resin because his cast metal tipper trucks kept derailing on bends due to the weight, you've got to laugh.)

Jan, yes, even more crazy than doing all of that casting is the fact that I didn't really bother checking out that much if it was really going to work. Part of me was thinking that it just won't turn out right when I try to assemble them. So once I had the half-built test tank this week, and a large number of links ready, it was time to do a temporary fitting.

A few preliminary fittings of the test tank to the Sculpey base, pressing it down into the clay to make sure the location is fixed in place:




Then I used a thin strip of double sided sticky tape applied to the inner groove and just stuck some of the plates onto it, the rearward facing lip overlapping with the plate behind:




I was kind of relieved that it seems to look OK, though feel free to contradict me. The detail of the rivets is a little uneven, but the upper surface looks OK when they are side by side, and they do look very uniform, which I guess is what is required.

From the side there is a bit of a problem in that they are perhaps a bit too angled, not sitting flat enough. I think I may need to take a little off the bottom locating plate so that they sit a bit deeper into the kit groove. Also in this photo, on the other side, is a section of Matador's resin tracks. Again, I am kind of happy that I think mine do look more like individual track plates, and are also thinner, which was one of the main reasons for not using the kit's rubber tracks.


So I then added some more all the way round to the front to model what happens where they disapper under the tank. The orange dots mark the extent of where I think they need to go:



Rich, you are correct, the preceding artillery barrage undoubtedly did more harm than good, making the ground virtually impossible to drive over. A very serious learning curve for all involved, at least for those that survived.

I have to confess, Matthew, that those track links looking absolutely fantastic. You're being entirely too discerning about their quality, but that's probably why they turned out so well.

Bravo!

What an unbelievable build. This is amazing!!!!

Those metal tracks you are casting are looking great Matthew! I'm hoping that my resin MK IV will turn out looking as good as yours is already turning out.

Thanks Adam, Dirk and Jeremy, enthusiastic comments truly appreciated. Jeremy, are you posting your build on this site?

More progress this week on tracks and base. The base had ground built up around the embedded sides and front, including a hump where the right track has been churning up soil and depositing in front like a conveyor. The bottom of the left sponson now digs in, and also accommodates the sticky-out gun. Can't quite decide if the end of the gun could also have dug in . . . seems quite likely, but can I bring myself to do it?

I had been thinking for a while about how to obtain the texture of the freshly pulverised soil that's so evident in the photos of the battlefield, the result of the big barrage preceding the tank action. I had some of the foil that had been used for bulking up the polymer clay, and tried rolling a roughly crumpled ball of it around on the clay surface with my finger; it kind of worked, so I did the whole thing with a slightly looser, more open textured foil crumple.
Left side textured, right side as sculpted:

Now all over:

. . . and have since completed more of the track marks entering the crater.

Looking at the photos of the battlefield is the best reference of course, but I had been looking out for colour references of this kind of freshly pulverised soil, to use when painting the base. So what should turn up in perfect view of the sixth floor of the office block that I work in, but this enormous pile of freshly pulverised soil? And then some bloke started driving caterpillar tracks all over it. Unbelievable really, so I had to take the camera and telephoto lens to work:

Track link clean up is complete (hooray), and then, with some inevitable extra fettling, they were all stuck to a plastic sheet with double sided sticky tape:

Then primed with grey acrylic primer:

Oh dear, lots of dust as well. Note the odd small hole in some of the castings, where the mould was clamped a bit too tight; others are a bit rough looking, but some will only be part visible, and there will also of course be plenty of compacted soil attached. Next I plan to paint the track plates prior to fitting them to the tank. Have been wondering about what glue to use; CA is out as I need to be able to reposition and fiddle, while epoxy sounds too messy, so I'm thinking of PVA. Since the tank is so firmly mounted on a base, and the links fit into the groove so well, it should hold well enough and will allow plenty of fiddling or even removal once set. Probably some varnish or some of the later weathering will serve to fix them on even more. So hopefully soon will come the reappearance of the tank itself.

You bet I do, I just started but you can check it out here in the Constructive Feedback forums. Feel free to leave a comment and share any thoughts you have

One issues I have with the MB resin kit is that metal track links supplied have spacers that are too narrow for the track runs. Yours look like they are going to have a much tighter fit.

Jeremy, that is an unusual looking kit, very different making a resin kit that size. Sounds like you have Darren doing a lot of research for you . . . From the photos he took of the Mk IV, it almost looks like the track plates have been painted at some point, they are very black... From photos I had of a Mk I in the Trevor Pidgeon book, I went with the idea that the base colour of the track plates was a dark red brown, an oxidised iron colour. So I painted them with a couple of washes of raw sienna and burnt umber:

Looking quite rough at that magnification . . .
Here we have the reappearance of the tank, and the fiddliness of attaching these plates. As mentioned, I'm doing this with PVA, as it takes about 30 mins or more to start to set, allowing time for adjustment, and is also very easy to clean up should anything go wrong or plates need removing. I just imagined various nightmare scenarios with CA or epoxy, then got the PVA out. The downside is that about three plates back are still very wobbly while attaching the next one. There has been a bit of additional filing of each plate to get it to fit the slightly irregular depth of the groove in which they are sitting, and supposing I had bought these plates as an accessory before building the kit, I would have made sure that these grooves were regularised during construction.

Plates are a little dusty from the filing, but generally I'm quite happy with the look; it's maybe not as good as I hoped it would be, but better than I thought it would be. Well, they're not totally regular, but this is big magnification!!

After a second two hour evening session, the top of one run is almost done. A strip of styrene has been attached into the groove (just visible on the extreme right) to lift the plates out a little towards the end of the track horn, where the adjustable sprocket is. Not sure if that is going to work or not, but I want to try to get that look where the tracks are tight to the body at some points, but held away at the front.

Indeed, Darren has been extremely helpful in guiding me through the details of the Mk IV. I just need to figure out how I am going to approach the necessary modifications...

Your build is coming along quite nicely. I like your thought process and approach at painting the tracks. I was thinking that early when Darren started posting pics of the restored tanks at Bovington for me.

I was wondering what the device is bridging between the track runs at the rear of the tank? And this may just be my own inexperience with these early tanks, but do the main guns seem a little long on this kit?

Coming along fabulously, Matthew. And it appears that you have achieved quite a monumental hit count on this thread with it approaching 12,000! Quite extraordinary for a Braille scale build.




Jeremy, I believe that these longer guns are appropriate for a Mark I. The originally fitted naval guns were 40-58 calibre's in length. A 58 cal. at this scale would measure out to 1.8". According to Wikipedia, the shorter guns (23 cal) were introduced in the Mk IV and later tanks due to the longer ones hanging up on obstacles. You can see the longer ones in this picture of a Mk II (for discussion purposes only).



Cheers,
Jan

Indeed, the long guns were I think adopted "as is" from the Navy, and were originally 2.28m long. The photo Jan linked to does still make the point, and I believe that without the view of the hatch on top, the only way to tell that is a Mk II is by the square track adjustment recess, while the Mk I had a rounded recess. Ironically, the Airfix Mk I has the square recess, one of the symptoms of the strange references that they used when creating it, and that I deemed just too hard to correct.


This is the mounting for the steering trailer; it's like a frame with some heavy springs that force the wheels of the trailer hard onto the ground, and it steers the tank a bit like a ship's rudder. There is a hydraulic cylinder on the rear of the body that was used to raise or lower the entire assembly. There are some photos earlier in the thread with the tail on, but I snapped it off when airbrushing, so I've left it off until the very end. These things were only ever used on the Mk 1 and even then only in their first few actions, as it was soon realised that they were more trouble than they were worth, sometimes breaking through use or shellfire and then proving an impediment. From then on the tails were dispensed with and the tanks were steered just by braking one or other track..

After several more evenings' work, I think I have all the track plates that I need attached. In the previous photo it can be seen that I had only attached those on the flatter part of the run, where PVA was fine, but when it came to the tight curve at the front end of the "horn" CA glue became necessary. Various amounts of trimming were needed on the mounting base of each plate across different parts as the depth of the groove varied, as mentioned previously, and the irregularity of the front of the track runs can be seen in this next photo. This isn't just me fitting the halves of each hull side together poorly, there is a bit of mismatch; obviously it would have been better if I had fixed this early on:


Some shots of the completed tracks:

There is a bit of metal dust and a few paint chips off the plates which will be cleaned up.

Once the glue is all fully set, a few of the plates will probably be adjusted, as the edges of them can be quite easily bent, but even as they went on, they line up fairly well.

At the front where the track adjuster pushes the tracks away from the "horn", I managed to get a bit of a gap with the additional strip of plastic underneath:

Now I need to test it out for fit on the base, then hopefully cook the base.

Jan & Matthew: Thanks for the schooling mates, it's great to be able to learn about this stuff through others who are interested in such things

Matthew, two words...fabulous and exellant. Do I see a upgrade kit/set for sale in the near future? What might be next? A scale interior with fully working components!

Cheers,
Jan

Matthew,

Been a while since I've had the change to check on your progress. Wow, I leave for a while and when I come back - BAMM, home made metal track links! Fantastic, just fantastic. What a treat!

Matthew you've got one killer SBS build log going here. And it's a 'Braille' build log at that. More, more, more.

-Eddy

Thanks Eddy for the appreciation and compliments. Sure didn't feel like BAMM when I made the inks, more like a several months of pondering followed by several weeks of mould making and casting followed by weeks and weeks of filing . . .

Now here is some more, but first something slightly different, and I have to say this really gobsmacked me for a few evenings as I played with it. I was looking on the web for some WW1 trench maps of the area in which our subject went into action, and came across a very good site on this subject, www.pathsofglory.co.uk, run by a collector and researcher, David O'Mara. Although he has posted some of his collection online, I purchased a CD of some Somme (ahem) trench maps from him (at a very reasonable price, payable by PayPal, arrived very quickly etc.) in order to get a bigger choice. I had also been checking out the location of our C3 crater on Google Earth, and, using the Trevor Pidgeon book, was able to locate the two possible positions he identified. So on GoogleEarth I planted this location marker for Chartreuse, in a field just outside Pozieres:

Right by where it says "D929", incidentally, there is a memorial to the tank crews that fought across this area.
Then here is a trench map from 1916 covering part of the same area (and I should point out that David said he was OK as long as he got a credit):

Then (and I must say I love this in GoogleEarth, it allows you to float an image on to the satellite photo, then scale, rotate and stretch it etc. until it fits) here is one laid on top of the other:

So you can see where the trenches were, and how where Chartreuse (possibly) got stuck, is very close to what had been, I think in the previous year, the front German line, where the two parallel defensive trenches are. Anyway, on GoogleEarth you can then fade the overlaid map in and out, it's really quite neat . . . I was trying it with some of the other trench maps, including working out the exact location of the notorious Quadrilateral trench near Ginchy; due to the fact that some roads, old rail lines, and of course the villages are still in exactly the same places, you can locate these features perfectly. I was amazed as I saw how Bouleaux Wood, literally shattered and splintered in this battle, has regrown to exactly the same size and shape it was before the war started, and how it is possible to trace the exact path of a single tank across a field from the British "Bully" trench across to the German one ("Beef"). Truly awesome.

So anyway, I was all inspired by that, and had in the meantime had a bit of a mishap when painting the polymer clay base. Because I wanted to paint the edges (the non-terrain part) by brush and use very opaque paint, I used enamel. It didn't seem to be drying though, despite having been applied over acrylic primer. I started looking for polymer clay advice and ended up at several websites populated by the kind of soft and cute second cousins of armour modellers, i.e. female crafters. Their advice is never use enamel paint on polymer clay as it never fully sets; mainly they use acrylic. Interestingly I noticed there's quite a bit of Klear / Future use by those girls as well.

So I scrubbed the paint off easily with some white spirit and went to a craft shop to buy some nice acrylic paint that would work with a brush, i.e. not Tamiya. Was browsing the Liquitex paint displays and happened upon one of those "hints" cards about creating acrylic transfers for use in collage, paintings, craft, etc. and then I had this idea . . . so I bought the necessary substance, "Gloss Medium & Varnish" as well as some Unbleached Titanium paint, which is a kind of pale sepia, like old paper, in fact.

So here is the method of creating a Liquitex acrylic transfer. I thought I'd document it at some length, as instructions found elsewhere, including on Liquitex's own web site, seemed to me to make it seem much more complex than it really is. Note also that in a few places I read about it only working with images produced by laser printers, but I boldly struck out with my inkjet and it seemed perfectly fine. I can't guarantee this is true for every inkjet printer, but mine is just a Canon MP600, which is a pretty normal kind of printer I think.

Here is one of the maps printed on 4x6 glossy photo paper and taped face up to a piece of glass (a cheap framed print in fact)


Here is some of the medium decanted into a foil lined milk carton top:


Here is a coat of the medium being applied with a 1 inch brush:

Bigger brush is quicker and produces fewer brush lines. I didn't put it on too thin, and the brush marks disappear a little but not completely. I did about 7 or 8 coats of this. The Liquitex hint card said you need a coating about 1/8" thick, which is just totally nuts; my coating is eventually more like 0.25mm.
You probably could airbrush this stuff, but I wasn't too bothered about a perfect finish for my purposes.
Each coat dries in about 20 minutes, then about two hours after the last coat, I cut it from the glass, put it face down on a plate and poured lukwarm water over it:


Left it for 10-15 minutes, then started to rub away at the now soggyish paper back:


Sorry, I've got right into the photos now... kept going until it's like this:


Then had another go because it comes off in a few layers, and you can see how transparent it becomes, as all you're left with is the ink from the print stuck to the acrylic film, with just a few small particles of paper still embedded:


Rinsed the bits of paper off under the tap. I said lukewarm water earlier as I think very cold water started to make the acrylic film harden up and it could possibly crack, but at a slightly warmer temperature it stayed very flexible:


After drying off on kitchen towel, you can see it is still very glossy, floppy and quite transparent. I then put it back on the glass sheet and under a book to dry off completely overnight.

Nice!

I'm really curious to see how you plan on utilizing your new transfer. While reading the article, my wife happened to jealously spy the Liquitex bottle, so I showed her what you had done. Always the experimenter, she had some alternative transfering techniques that could be applicable for scale modeling. She is definitely not a scrapbooker or rubberstamper and found uses for this outside of those realms.

Here's a cellulose transfer technique that might interest you:
You'll need -
1. Lacquer thinner
2. A graphic that's from either a laser printer or an ink-jet with the right kind of ink (which I suspect your printer has given the results of your transfer). Don't forget to reverse it or it'll end up backwards.
3. A spoon or something to burnish with.
4. A glass bowl or container (or anything that would be safe for lacquer thinner).
5. Q-tips or something to apply it to the image with.

You'll want to do this somewhere with good ventilation as the lacquer thinner is noxious.

1. Put the image face down onto whatever you want the image to transfer to.
2. Use a Q-tip to wet (but not soak) a small amount of the image (it evaporates so you can't do large areas at a time).
3. Using the smooth side of the spoon, rub the area firmly.
4. Repeat for the rest of the image.

For more detailed directions go here: http://craftycuriosities.blogspot.com/2008/06/poor-mans-silk-screen-tutorial.html

Packing tape transfer method:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Packing-Tape-Image-Transfers/

This is a personally untested rub-on-transfer technique:
http://www.rubberstampingfun.com/rna.html

Easy Transparency Alternative:
http://tryittuesdays.wordpress.com/2006/05/23/technique-week-2-easy-transparency-alternative

A good site with a wealth of information on polymer clay is glassattic.com.

Adam, thanks for all those links, I have stored them all; in fact that tryittuesdays method looks very similar to the Liquitex medium method I used. Also, I think that polymer clay site is one of those I found that had info on finishes. By the way, I didn't mean in any way to belittle the world of female crafting.

What I have done with the map transfers is definitely in the realm of craft use rather than the normal use of decals or transfers we see in this hobby, though I might see if it possible to use the technique for making decals for a vehicle.

So, having repainted the sides of the base with Liquitex soft body Bleached Titanium paint (you can see in the next photo) which was an absolute pleasure to use, and allowing it to dry, I then started to fix a semi-trimmed section of map to the base with the same Liquitex Medium used for creating the transfer:

It was all very forgiving - the medium fixes easily without being messy, and the transfer has a bit of stretch in it so that it clings well and can be shaped to the countours:


When dry I had this:


Then trimmed the top off with a brand new blade, again, much more easy and forgiving than I thought it would be:






As usual, I slightly messed up as there is a gap (naturally just out of shot). I should have bothered to scale the print to fit the base properly, but I was just too impatient. So I have a couple of joins, but plan to varnish the whole thing in any case, so i'm hoping it will bring it all together. One thing I really like is that it is a nice shiny surface which seems quite tough now it is fixed in place, so the base can be handled without fear of fingerprints, dirt etc. transferring to it.

Next, I'd better get the tank out again and stick it on.

Glad to see the links helped! By the way, no worries about offending anyone.

Interestingly, I was at Michaels (an Art, Craft, and Hobby supply store) with my Wife yesterday looking at the Liquitex supplies. They had modeling paste and texture gels (http://www.liquitex.com/Products/texturegelmediums.cfm) which my wife though would work very well for our purposes. I agreed although I'm a cheap, miserly bastard and decided not to get any right now.

Do you have any other shots of the top of the base? I don't recall seeing it finished, or maybe my mind has just gone from cyanoacrylate fumes from all the metal I've been glueing on my current project.

Very nice display, though! It should look very slick once the tank has been mounted.

Nice idea with the paper-map!
Also this thing is a beauty! (can I say that?)
Yes, it loosk great!

Also all the extra-work (tracks, base and now the map) leads to a good finish!

greetings...
Soeren

Adam, the top of the base, the best I have at the moment is this one, before the maps were applied:


Hard to get the whole thing in focus even with the aperture right open, will have to shoot from further away then enlarge. It was also base coated in Humbrol dark earth, but I have washed and over brushed with so much oil paint that I think the enamel is completely covered over and it is no longer at all sticky.

I now have the tank mounted to the base; it was actually quite difficult getting it into the track marks, as at the front it is so deeply embedded into the ground work. Had to do some excavation, which was quite easy in the polymer clay as it carves quite well. Ended up fixing it on with epoxy (Araldite) and am now engaged in blending the joins / adding earth effects (or trying to). Currently witholding any pictures of the whole thing actually - trying to keep a bit of suspense going again, you see - for those who haven't fallen off yet.

I know what you and your wife mean about the Liquitex supplies... I was thinking the same thing about applicability of some of those texture gels etc. but I also know what you mean about the expense, as they aren't that cheap.

Soeren -


Absolutely you can say that, and in fact that really pleased me. I think that is what I have had in mind. Something about the beauty from the ugliness of the reality. Brings to mind that the early camo schemes (of which this is a modification) were created by a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, but also what I have said before about the weapon of destruction trying to blend in with the earth and the fields and the trees, the things that give life. . . and this one blended so well into the earth, it couldn't get out again.

I really love the look of the mud that you achieved; I'm fairly certain I've been stuck in mud that looked just like that!

Very inspiring though... engenders the urge to work harder on my EOD campaign submission.

With this in mind, and after some early attempts at fixing powdered pastel chalk with oil paint went a bit skewy, I was forced over to "Creative World", or whatever it's called, to check these materials out again. The equivalent products by Windsor & Newton turned out to be about 60% of the cost of the Liquitex items, not sure if that would be the case in the USA; Liquitex items in Europe seem to be made in France, so it could partly be the Euro / £ exchange rate that has done that. Anyway, bought some Large Grain Gel, which is colourless acrylic matt medium with various chunks of some randomly shaped gritty stuff, between around 1 - 3mm diameter.

Here are completely untreated joins between tank and base:

So I want the tank to look like it is stuck fast and has been grinding its way into the ground; as the driver tries to extricate it from the crater, one or both tracks probably just turn.
This is powdered pastel chalk applied to burnt umber oil paint. You can see where the oil is absorbed by the pastel, it looks a bit like a dog peed on it. The problem is that the oil takes a very long time to dry and lots of chalk is required.

Here are the materials in use. Four different colours of pastel mixed together. The soil in this part of France seems quite similar to that near where I live, quite dark and loamy, with a fair bit of clay and organic material, not much in the way of grit. Photos of the battle suggest that it hadn't rained very recently, but would still be moist underneath, so that once the earth was churned up by shell fire, it would have been pulverised into variously sized lumps rather than either being muddy or dusty (this is mid-September).

Annoyingly I managed to spill a load of pastel into the texture gel, which has been mixed with burnt umber acrylic (from the sale bin! - result!)

Here is a bit of my method (sorry for having accidentally lowered the camera resolution) Simple really, dab a bit of the texture gel on with a small brush, making sure I get some of the grains; tip on a load of pastel from a bigger brush, and give the whole thing a bit of a tap and shake to distribute it on to the gel; wait a few minutes then gently tip it off on to a piece of card for reuse, then blow the rest across the dining table. . .

Here you can see the effect of some of the grains covered in the pastel, looking hopefully like chunks of earth. Notice it hasn't stained the powder like the oil paint did. The few still bare patches can be re-dusted later.

Although I said it was simple, it's actually taking ages to apply all of this, so tonight I'm taking a break. I think I'm also getting into that thing right near the end of making a model when you get like a tension about how much more to do, and when to stop. How much earth to apply to the top of tank and to the tracks...?

The final effect looks very nice; it looks like slightly damp earth that has caked onto the tracks and dried out. I have some pastels, but I've never used them as such. I like using pigments but I've never wanted to pay the kind of money that MIG charges for their pigments, so I get them from this site:

http://www.tkbtrading.com/category.php?category_id=43

It's actually a cosmetics site, but pigments are pigments and interspersed amongst the vivid colors are earthy and rusty tones, as well as sandy and black. With some mixing you can get pretty much any color and tone that you want. You also get a lot more pigment for a lot less money.

I definitely understand what you mean about knowing how much or little to apply... I try to imagine a scenario and what kind of dirt the vehicle would encounter. In this case, I imagine upon getting stuck the Chartreuse would have spun its tracks quite a bit, which in the process of digging itself further in would have thrown quite a bit of dirt onto it. This doesn't solve the entire problem for me, but it usually gives me some direction.

wow, this is some fantastic build! whatever happened to it?
are there more finished photos?

Those cast metal tracks are making me re-think my build...aaarrggghhh!

But very nice, very nice!