Welcome and festive greetings to my blog of this latest Dragon Jeep offering!

To accompany the recent review I had published I shall be doing a full build review of this kit, running through each of the steps and hopefully finishing up by slapping a coat of paint on this thing.

Lets kick off with that beautiful box art by Ron Volstad:



Construction begins with the wheels, which are very nice:



Fairly easily constructed from 3 parts:



Lovely detailing on the brake drums, these just slot onto the axles:



The rear wheels have hub caps which need to be glued on:




At this point I shall mention that the instruction sheet randomly calls out for one to assemble some of the SAS Jeep specific parts, such as flimsy rack and drivers shield. I suspect Dragon have thrown this in at random so as to add these steps to the instructions they already have. Anyway, I choose to skip past these steps and just focus on the basic Jeep at present.

So now we move on to the chassis, where things start to get a little more complicated:



I began by cleaning up the chassis frame which has a few mould lines to remove:



The front bumper requires some modification as SAS crews chopped these down or removed them altogether:



Basically just snip the ends off to where the bumper attaches to the frame:



Here you can examples of the modified bumper or one chopped out altogether (all photos for discussion purposes only!)



Now, the instructions suggest constructing the chassis and axles as a unit and then fitting to the main body, however I decided to fit the basic chassis frame to the main body now. The body is a single moulding, just bear careful of the large sprue pieces attached to the rear:



I started work next on the front axle, made up of a couple of components:



The instructions suggest fitting the track rod to the axle, however the connection is very flimsy to I left this off for the moment. Its then suggested that one fit the axle to the front drive shaft, however again the joint is very small and flimsy:





As you can see, the size of the hole and connection on the shaft and axle is very limited.

It seems to me that the best way to go about constructing the front chassis is to fit the leaf springs in place and then attach the axle to those in situ, this is much less hassle and ensures the parts are glued correctly in place.

So at this point I skipped a step ahead and fitted the front leaf springs:



Beware, the instructions have the parts numbered the wrong way round:



Heres the springs in place:



Now the axle can be easily glued on top of them:



(note the rather large mould marks on the fenders)



The fit is nicely snug and ensures the axle links up to the drive shaft without me having to hold the two together while the glue dries and the instructions would have you do.

Time now to fit the track rod. The first problem encountered is that the small plates which the track rod fits to on the ball joint, should have a small pin to enable to track rod to glue in place, then pins however haven't been moulded, as you can see here:



The easiest thing to do is simply attach these parts to the ball joint thus:



Yep, its fiddly stuff….



And then the track rod fits in place fairly easily:





Finally the shock absorbers are glued in place:




Stay tuned for more updates shortly!…...

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, its time to update this.

I've fitted the rear axle:





Then this perforated plate was to be added to the chassis:





The instructions call out for the exhaust to be removed (see above), which I duly did. I guess these were removed on SAS Jeeps, perhaps someone can shed some light on this?



(Note that I started drilling out the perforations, then decided this wasn't worth the hassle as they aren't visible on the finished model.)

Next up we move onto the engine and engine compartment, as detailed in the instructions (again, please note that i'm skipping the SAS specific items until later):



Engine block, fairly well detailed:







Battery and other bits fitted to the engine compartment:



Theres also a little step between the fender and main body which needs to be removed.

Before:



After:



Unfortunately due to my haste in attaching the chassis to the body, I had some difficulty fitting the engine:



So I had to remove the perforated plate and chop away some plastic from the transmission base:



With a little persuasion the engine now fits fairly snug:



And from below:



One may wish to leave the engine unglued so as to remove it for painting, which is what I initially decided to do, however made the decision later to glue this in place as I would be closing the hood and only painting the bottom of the engine.

The radiator is next to be assembled, again this comes with parts for the engine compartment interior:



The backing for the headlights and marker lights are moulded integrally, i've fitted the clear fronts for the marker lights below:



One should be aware that the marker lights weren't always fitted behind the grill, with many NWE Jeeps exhibiting them fitted onto the fenders instead, heres a few examples (Again discussion purposes only):







Note that the grill openings are blanked off on some examples. Dragon do provide a photo-etch disc for blanking off the left headlight in their kit.

One SAS specific item which would need to be fitted now are the armoured slats for the radiator, sadly these are very badly represented in the kit:





Just look how bad they are compared to the reference pics above and with the wrong number of slats. This unfortunately left me with no choice but to leave them off and thus build a vehicle without them. Really these need to be represented with etch, or at least something in plastic better than Dragons offering.

Anyway, thats all for now, more updates soon!

Nice start. It seems it would be pretty simple to replicate the radiator louver with some strip stock, no?

I think you're probably right Jesse, however I wanted to stick to building this out of the box and as you'll see later, other problems in the kit swayed me in the direction of leaving these off.

I'm a little dubious about the leaving off the exhaust. It would result in a massive loss of power with an open manifold and the noise would be incredible. I don't think DML has got this quite right somehow

Yes i'm not convinced either, seems like a very odd modification to make, I think i'll stick it back on.

Very interesting build. One of my very first kits was the Tamiya desert SAS jeep, way back when it was first released! I kinda want anothe rone just for nostalgia's sake.

Re your exhaust, logic would suggest that they installed an even larger muffler than standard to cut noise for use in an armed recce role. Leaving the manifold and some pipe but less the muffler would increase power a little, maybe the jeeps were so overloaded that they needed the boost even with the downside of the extra noise? I'd be interested to see who can shed more light on Dragons interpretation .....

cheers
Brent