Really nice work, but don't forget the armor plate on the front of the II box.

Keith.

The which box? Still got some plates to add to the hull, in particular the ones at the front and need to add the camera in the middle as well. That will come soon...

Just a very quick update for today - remember I said I needed to add the two small details on this pic:
 

 
Namely the clamp near the commander hatch and the gizmo behind the gunners hatch, well they are now included:
 

 
You'll also notice I've removed the armour panels from the stowage boxes for painting and of course its been primed. You can't see them but I've also added the brackets to the front side panels, next to the smoke dischargers that seem to be there to allow something to be attached, ie these:
 

 
I suppose I can't put it off any longer, next job is going to be the bar armour...

The last week or so has seen some significant progress being made, firstly on the turret:



Its had a lick of paint which went on nicely and the ECM box has been finally attached. This did require the attachment of another ribbed pip which can be seen here behind the commander's hatch



The paint still needs work done with washes etc and various details picked out but that will happen soon enough



So next job was to make a start finally on the bar armour. To do this I printed out my plan, gave it several coats of pray varnish to protect it, then a quick blast of spray mount which makes the surface sticky to hold the thin strips of plastic in place when I am building the frames like this:



I also built a job to be able to drill the holes properly aligned



This is just two square section rods glued together with a 0.6mm hole drilled through it and slots cut at the right locations to accept the bar armour slats and hold them firmly in place. There are still some misalignments - especially if I get the initial alignment wrong, but its vastly quicker and more accurate than my previous jigs from 2 years ago!

Here is the first set of bar armour panels for the turret:



As you can see there are some irregularities so I'm thinking about trying the larger panels again. You can see from the centre one that one of the main problems is keeping things straight - the middle section of that panel is narrower that the ends. The left and right panels also show other misalignments, some of which I may live with as this stuff gets knocked about a bit in real life anyway. Some of it is just to bad and will have to be replaced however.

That said, I'm not that unhappy with the first attempts. I've just ordered another 10 packs of #103 Evergreen strip (0.25 x 1.5mm) which should keep me in enough plastic for a while

Good thing I ordered lots of strip! For today's update, I've redone the three large panels for the turret as the previous attempts were just a bit to "all over the place" and they've come out well second time around. So now it is the moment of truth to see how well then fit around the turret...



Now my first thought on seeing how much gap there is betweenthe bar armour and the turret was "oh **** its too big!" However when I started comparing it to the photos, in particular these:









you can see that there is significant space around the turret and armour. Most particualr however is to see that the front corner joint lines up with the lifting hook, which is where the bracket that supports the front of the armour is located and joins the turret! My second reaction was therefore "Phew!"

Next is fixing the bar armour to the turret!

Don't know how much progress I'll make this week - I'm being sent to Brussels for work later int he week then at the weekend is the Lancing model show, so I'll probably only have tomorrow evening available to do any work on it. Fingers crossed then!

Well today brought good news and bad news. Good news is my trip to Brussels has been cancelled so I can do more on the Scimitar, bad news is I can no longer deny that the bar armour is too big



Tonight I joined the turret bar armour panels together and attached the front supports to fix the alignment better, but all that showed was the overall width is too wide and the length from front ot back is also too great. The bar armour should be much closer to the rear ECM box than it is



and the side gaps are too great - the inner front edge should be in-line with the outer edge of the side turret bins. Its really annoying because as you can see





this second lot of bar armour really looks the business!!

So what does this mean? well I have to go back and re-scale my original plan. Its just too big. The critical measurement I now have is the width of the turret, which should correspond to the rear panel minus the corner panels. If I rescale my diagram to that width that should be enough to scale it down. We are likely talking about a 5 or 6% decrease...

Oh well back to the drawing board (literally!)

So I've gone back to the plans and with some measuring and calculating, I shrank my original plan by 8% and that seems to have done the trick:





Now not only does the front and sides match up, the rear isn't too far back and not only that but the height matches the side bins which if you check my earlier pictures is correct too - the earlier attempt was much too tall! Now we are cooking with gas!!!

Except...

I've got to make another jig as the spacing is all different now and all the work I've done up to now has to be re-done. Again I say thank goodness I ordered another 10 packets of strips last week!!!

So after a trip down to the south coast for the SHouthdowns model show yesterday, I came home with this little beauty:



because I've seen photos of the British version here:


(sourced from this thread: http://plain-military.proboards.com/thread/5450/ex-pashtun-dawn-2014-last)

which just looks the absolute business! You can immediately se that the kit comes with the American-style bar armour, so that would have to be replaced with the more complicated British bar armour, but I reckon I'm up for that jobbie! Okay I'm sure there are a load of differences to the kit for the British version. Will have to start the in-depth research for that!

in other news, the first of the new sized armour panels have been produced and are looking good, so progress with this continues now I'm back from my travels...

Well I think I can now honestly say YES!!!



That is more like it!!! This is now the correct size, both height, width and depth... phew!



Now to get on with it...

So this afternoon I was able to build the supporting brackets for the turret bar armour so these have now been attached along with bolts in appropriate places:











Very happy with how this looks now. Time for some paint when everything is set and dry, which should even out some of the roughness in its appearance. In the meantime, need to start building the hull bar armour... its all go this bank holiday weekend!!!

The II box with the Yellow "Keep clear of this door" warning plate on the front of it!

Keith.

Ah gotcha, yup will sort that out in the fullness of time

Well the last couple of days have been spent building more bar armour panels. Here you can see the back door, with the hinges attached and the cut-away in the armour to allow the towing hook to poke out. There are also some connecting rods that attach the hinged bar armour to the door that are not visible here.



Here, without the bar armour panel you can see the hinges on the right and the brackets for the connecting rods on the door. Here I'm using the resin pieces that come with the Accurate Armour Warrior bar armour set as they are identical to the fittings for the Scimitar bar armour.



Finally in this short update, the right side bar armour constructed so far



The extra strips arrived today so I doubt if I will run out and I was able to pick up some 0.5mm diam bras rod from Little Cars at Southdowns show on Saturday, so I'm covered for materials for now!

Looking really good now Andy coming alone nicely

Thanks Paul

Sadly I completely wrecked one of the new armour panels this evening so will have to build it again - the most difficult part of the process is drilling the holes for the vertical rods and getting them to align properly. During this process several of the horizontal strips broke, so it'll have to be scrapped and another panel built from scratch. Its slow painstaking work, but for some reason I enjoy it... yup certifiable, thats me!

So,after a day out at the Salisbury show, I found the motivation to "get on with it!" yesterday evening and some good progress was the result:



As you can see this isn't fully fixed yet, but all the attachment points have been sorted out, there are a quite a few of these:







which compares with the original:





Everything has been trimmed ready to fit, will just need to be attached and some bolt heads added to complete it. I'm thinking I should be putting the wheels and tracks on soon. iv'e got the tracks all painted up but not yet weathered.. However, the job today will be to get a move on with the left side panels so that I can them move around to the front and fit the ECM pods along with the front panel. I suspect I may need to be a bit clever with fitting the front panel and keep it so that the width can be adjusted to fit...

This afternoon, after mowing the lawn, it was so nice I ended up sitting out in the garden but didn't want to waste any time on this build so took out with me a bunch of diorama materials to work on the base that this will eventually be displayed on. A year or more ago I built a small base for something else that int he end never used it - can't for the life of me remember what it was, so I thought I'd re-purpose it for this build.

It did need some work as it was geologically inaccurate for a portion of the Sailsbury Plain training area which is a chalk and clay region, so the track needed to be reworked to be more chalky. This was done by grinding down some railway ballast into smaller pieces and mixing with some light grey pastel chalk. Then the bank needed rebuilding with better foliage and grasses. The end result is this:



I think the rubberised horsehair may need a bit of trimming as its a bit flyaway at the back

This evening will be returning to the bar-armour panels while catching up on Farscape and Stargate SG1 recorded last week... looking forward to it

Had a busy few days: tracks on, body painted, right side bar armour built, bar armour panels painted and test fitting:







I used Alcad Chrome for the headlights and my custom sand mix for the overall paint scheme. Sadly I'm running out of my custom paint mix and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to reproduce the mix again!

The bar armour on the above photos is not yet glued into place, its just resting on the various support brackets, but it was enough to allow me to measure up the missing front panel and show that its about 5mm narrower than the plan version, so this allows me to adjust it as the side panels need to be parallel at the front and not played out to allow it to fit!

The two figures have now had their cam painted and still working on the faces, plus some stowage items that still need some work done to pick out highlights and details etc.



Its getting closer!!!

Andrew that is looking really good. The pic from the front really shows it's heritage.

Paul

Thanks Paul - I'll just have to make sure that when I fix the side panels on I'll make a better job that when I took that pic Hopefully that'll get done tonight...

Some big changes today... after running out of the my old colour mix, I spent this morning mixing up a new colour while watching the D-Day commemorations and decided that since I wasn't totally happy with how yellow the previous paint was I'd try a new mix. This was the result:



You can see the difference in colour from the wheels to the body. Problem is, this isn't yellow enough!



So I added a couple of drops to the mix and tried again and got a reasonable colour. In the meantime I added the last bits of detail to the front hull, which includes the plasan plate and the sensor in the middle plus extra wiring on both side of the body:





Sadly in the repaint I overpainted the carefully sprayed Alcad chrome of the headlights (sigh), so I repainted using Tamiya Titanium silver... and the proceeded to overpaint again by accident when spraying the new additions. Once day I'll get the hang of this painting malarkey!

I then decided it was time to stop muckign about and finally fix the side bar armour panels once and for all.. so I did and then couldn't resist trying this out:



Major problem: the turret bar armour interferes with the hull bar armour so there is on way the turret could rotate. I tried adding an extra thick layer around the turret ring but that still doesn't elevate the turret high enough. I reckon the height measurements on the side panels are wrong, but its too frelling late (been watching a lot of Farscape this evening!) to fix that now - I'm NOT rebuilding the whole load of bar armour AGAIN!!! I'm working on the turret armour brackets to see if I can angle them up a bit to at least not have the panels pressing against each other. This model won't have a moveable turret, but I'd like to pose it pointing straight forward, so it has to play nice with the hull.

One of the things that I'd left until near the end was the gun support mechanism on the front hull deck, ie this:



So a few scraps of plasticard, strip and rod later...



There is another piece that was fabricated after the photo was taken which is the support bracket underneath this. Today was spent putting lots of little details together such as the fire extinguishers and some decals (eg the "Danger, keep away from this door" on the turret. Also put the driver in his place and gave his helmet a microphone. Then this afternoon I had 3 goes at building the very last panel for the front. It took 3 tries because the first one was the full size as designed but that was vastly too wide. The second attempt went totally out of shape so the third attempt ended up about 5mm narrower than the orginal plan and that is what you see here:



Its still being glued and it has shown up another slight problem with the bar armour panels, namely the left side protrudes further to the front than the left, so the front panel is crooked. Its not much but I'm a bit at a loss as to what to do about it that doesn't involved taking the panels off and trimming things back! it may be a case of replacing the corner front left corner panel with a different one, with a greater than 45 degree slant to correct for the overshoot...

I'm going to sleep on it. There is a bloody good chance that this will be finished for the club night on Monday - I would never have believed that at the start of the week!!

So after almost 2 and a half months, it is DONE!!!!



Well almost... it still doesn't have number plates because I'll need to make those separately as I can't find a suitable set of white letters to make "NG 50 AB" or "PC 34 AB" which are the two possible reg numbers for the photos I've used as the basis of the build:



So here are the rest of the photos:











Phew, that was a bit mammoth! And now for the Buffalo!! Yeah thats going to happen soon...

Nice work mate BUT you still forgot the armor plate on the II door.

There is a second strap across the drivers open hatch, easily added, as are the wire cutters...

This has been a great build to follow and my hat is off to you Sir.

Very well done.

Keith.

Dammit forgot the wire cutters! I've just realised what you meant by the armour plate on front of the II box... I had to go and look at the photos of the original to realise it - never noticed that before! Ditto the second strap on the driver hatch...

Thanks for being so perceptive

Stunning work Andy, love it