This is my entry for the Achtung Jabo campaign. This is my comeback after an over 20 years hiatus. I will built the Academy Wirbelwind mostly OOB.

First a few points about the kit. This is a poor copy of the old Tamiya offer. Lots of flash, big mold lines, wheels are more oval than round etc... I supppose you got what you paid for On the other hand the Academy kit is around $25CAN here compare to the $60 price of the (new) Tamiya offer.

Anyway this will be a good training in flash/mold line removing, gap filling and other minor technics. And if I make a mess while building or painting it I will not feel too bad. :-)

So here we go...

First the workbench. As you can see I'm still farily well equiped. Even If I didn't make any kit in a long time I still kept all my tools. I also played with some Games Workshop Games in the last 15 years and so was building and (rarely) painting on another kind of hobby.



Here's the Wirbelwind I hope to build on a good level


And a few progress shots on the chassis and hull. As you can see there is a lot of putty and sheet styrene. The built itself was quite easy with no real major fit problems.

Looks good so far, I am doing the same kit as well. It is good to see that I am not the only one who had that rather large gap to fill on the back deck

Looks good so far. Good kit to start with on returning to the hobby. Welcome back

I can see you have your Ravenwing poster left in place. Nice "Nerver forget - never forgive"

Looking good so far Richard, and welcome back to the hobby too!

Looking good so far. Keep us posted on your progress.

Richard,

Looking forward to seeing how it comes out. Good luck!!

Darryl

Time for a good update.

Here I blocked half the hole for the turret retaining mechanism. They were so large you could saw them even when the turret was fitted



A few in-progress shots of the quad flak. Putty is an essential part of the process. Fitting, while good is far from being perfect.







Here we have the spare track brackets. I use sheet styrene and the PE ones coming with the Dragon Kugelblitz as template. Far from perfect but not too bad in my book.

We now move to the turret.

I've decided to try my hand at weld line. I will be using a feature from Armorama that can be found here: Weld Lines by Lee Lloyd

First I used a sribing tool to make a groove so that the lines don't look like they're floating.



Here's what I used to make the lines: Two part fine epoxy putty, some plexiglass to roll the putty and an homemade weld tool based on a seryngue needle (see above article)







I first worked on the inside walls before gluing the turret parts together.



After that I glued the turret, made the groove on the outside and put the weld lines. They are quite overscale (the one inside look's more like they came from a battleship ). But hey! It's a learning project so I'll live with it. We cold also pretend that they were made by russian prisonner :-)













And the project so far:

Hi Richard. It may have been some time since you built last, but your skills are still there . Nice tidy work and the putty/filling/clean up work is excellent as is the weld lines. Good luck with the rest.
You were right to start out on an old kit ...these skills are still needed on the high-tech modern kits as well, but not maybe to the same degree.

I do like this vehicle with its typical turret which resembles a coffee machine!

Anyway, it's visible that this kit is fairly old... it reminds me the old Tamiya offers! I'm sure the final result will be great!
Good luck!

Maybe because it is a Tamiya offer I'm building the tamiya kit, but would not be able to tell the difference, right to the gap at the end of the hull...

Looks good, nice weldbeads on the turret.

Looking forward to see some paint hit the turret.

Thanks for the comments Jesper. While I think the weldbeads looks quite good for a first attemp I still find them a little overscaled. The paintjob should tone them a little I hope

I'm quite ready for the paintjob but need to build some kind of spraybooth before. It's winter here and don't want to go outside to put some primer on a kit

Richard,

Looks good so far. You're doing a great job with the putty! Keep us posted on your progress.