1:35 CRV(T) Scimitar 2 scratch/kitbash build

[Kallisti]

Lot more work taken place so far this weekend. First of all the front of the hull has been worked on:

Here you see the resin bins from Castoff, plus kit headlights, scratch built box with "wings" while underneath is the kit tow hooks plus some extra armour panels added using plastic card. Bolts are just blobs of Mr Dissolved Putty.

Next started to work down the left side

More appliqué armour panels plus the track rod from the kit with PE holders and straps. The side bin has been built up from parts of bins that come with the kit, plus a piece of PE mesh from the Samson kit, and I've just realised I've got the hinge in the wrong place so that will have to go . I drilled a hole for the brass rod to represent the tube thing you can see here:

(image from http://plain-military.proboards.com/thread/4925/scimitar-2-complete-walkaround-over used with permission)

On the right side not so much has been done:

simply because the right side is a lot more complex with the exhaust pipe being shielded with plasan panels eg

which as yet I can't reproduce properly. I'm getting some pieces from Terry at Castoff at some point soon which will hopefully let me handle that. in the meantime, attention switched to the turret. Again there are a few appliqué armour panels to add

Lots os small details to add to those later, including the smoke dischargers etc. The side bins on the turret are the same as those from the kit ie

but they have has plasan added as can be seen in the previous walkaround pic. Castoff do replacement versions of these for the LEP upgrade I used for the Scimitar 2 years ago so I'm getting them from Terry. However one of the main structural additions to the Scimitar 2 turret is what goes on at the rear, namely the big Baraccuda box and the "spoiler"

As that last pic shows, its fortunate that they used the same mating panel to the back of the turret as was used for the older bins, so I can reuse the kit part as the basis for the scratch build... ta da!

I am planning to build the box today. I picked up some baraccuda decal stuff at Cosford last year so will give that a go.

More to follow after the long weekend

Edited April 19, 2014 by Kallisti

[Alpha Delta 210]

Great progress! I can't wait for the next instalment.

[Kallisti]

Thanks, starting the box this afternoon...

[Kallisti]

As promised, here is the box:

I used the AFC Club barracuda decal and mixed a custom Desert Sand to match the MiG Modern British Sand colour I got a while ago. I don't like the pain however so I use it to match my Tamiya paints to, like I did with the Airfix Warrior. I think I got the Airfix warrior a bit too yellow, so this time I'm toning it down slightly and put more white in and its come up nicely I reckon. You can see the efforts at colour matching on the top of the aerosol - can you spot where I got it right finally?

So the next stage is fixing it to the "spoiler" and that is done in the real thing like this:

So here goes!

I punched some 2mm disks out of card and used some PE sprue bent appropriately to create the angle brackets. The clasps and handle were from the spare PE from previous Scimitar builds. The paintwork needs a wash to properly bring out the details, but I had to assemble the box and barracuda camo before assembly. I've got some guitar strings on order to use as the corrugated pipework you see on various parts of the hull. I'll probably leave the box and spoiler assembly off the turret until much later in the build.

More armour panels have been added to the hull while watching Jimi Hendrix on BBC 4 last night...

I'm not sure what that box is, you can see it here:

and here

I still need to make those "holey" plasan armour panels, and as yet I'm struggling for ideas on how to do it. I'm consulting with Terry at Castoff as to how he did his panels for the LEP armour upgrade. More on that in the future hopefully!

Finally just to get an idea of how its going...

Next job is to do the indicator lights and ECM pod assemblies that hand off the front

That should be fun

[Kallisti]

I think I should point out right now that this build will NOT include ANY cotton wool at any point in the construction!

(for a change!)

[heloman1]

Lookin' good, I do like a bit of armour with atitude.

Colin

[foxy]

Crumbs your moveing on well with this build.

Very nice work indeed.

Cheers foxy

[Mr Grumpylee]

This is good!!! I'm liking the detail going into this...brilliant!

Lee

[Kallisti]

Had a bit of a hiatus on this as I've been distracted with other things the last few days. However I've also been waiting for some things to be delivered and one of those arrived today, namely some guitar strings so that I can use them to do this:

namely add the corrugated pipe that is attached to the rear strut of the ECM "spoiler". I've got plent left over for some other pipework at the front to connect the indicator lights and ECM pods.... speaking of which, its taken three attempts so far to get to this:

and this

They were surprisingly difficult to build as the angles are all wrong (omg its a Hound of Tindalos!) and as you can see they are rather on the small side! There was some "normal" modelling as well to get the cannon fixed up:

I'm still waiting for the pierced armour plate PE I ordered which will allow me to continue with the hull work. You will also notice in the first photos that there is a plan for the bar armour ready to go - I printed this out over the weekend and sprayed it with gloss varnish a few times to give it a nice smooth surface on which I can build the various frames. Still not sure if I'm entirely scratch building it from strip or using some of the Warrior panels as well. I guess we'll just have to build them ans see how it looks! That will be happening sooner rather than later now...

[Kallisti]

Just a very quick update today, as the pierced plate PE arrived yesterday which allowed me to do this to one of the turret bins:

which can be compare to this

although this shows I still need to add some bolts and fastenings

but its a start...

[Kallisti]

So having tried out that pierced armour mesh and compared it to the real thing, I think the hole spacing is too small. So I ordered the other Airwaves PE pierced sheet which has 33 holes per inch instead of 55 and here they are side by side:

I think the newer one is much better looking, so I'm going to have to start again on the pierced armour. Thankfully, I've got plenty of spare turret stowage boxes available to practice on! In the meantime been fixing up the commander's periscope:

Kit part on right, modified part on left. There was some PE available for the outer box but it didn't really add that much to the kit part. The main thing was replacing the solid disk with a ring which on mine is just a slice of brass tube. You can see the spare turret boxes in the background.

Exhaust pipe, silencer and guard has been added

I'll do the pierced armour cage soon, along with the plates that go around that box. As a slight aside, continued with more work on the crew:

Driver on right Commander on left. Gunner will be inside on this build as I can't be arsed with a third figure The commander is based on a test shot figure that Terry from Castoff sent me when I was doing the bar armour before. I need to add camo to the helmet to properly represent the guys who were driving this around on Salisbury Plain in 2012:

[Kallisti]

The bank holiday weekend allowed a lot more progress to be made. So with the new PE pierced armour, I was able to make the plates that go around the exhaust and the box:

Now because the plates are cut from the PE, you end up with a ragged edge which is not visible on the real thing:

So to counter this I developed a technique where the edges get filled with superglue and/or Mr Surfacer 500 or bracketed with a strip of 0.25mm x 0.5mm plastic strip, which when the joint is dry gets sanded down to the same thickness as the PE. This should give the impression of the edging as seen on the real thing. To be honest its a little out of scale - but then again so is the pierced armour, but the more true to scale version just doesn't look good in my opinion.

This view lets you see the way its formed around the exhaust pipes and shows the extra plate the protects the joint to the hull.

Attention then shifted to the turret. You can see above where the smoke dispensers have been added. Next up,, notice this thingamujig on the upper left of the photo:

This had to be scratch built:

I'm so glad I invested in the punch and die set from Hungary a couple months ago - its been a godsend in this build! You'll also see the box thing at the rear of the commander's hatch which can be see here:

which has a connector to the ECM box. There are a couple of the periscopes aroudn the commander hatch that have been removed fromt he standard configuration - the rear facing one has had a blanking plate put over it while the next one anti-clockwise is replaced by this box. I still need to scratch build the fitting that looks like it should be supporting the amber flashing light that is used on road trips. Similarly, there is some sort of fitting further back that should be added.

Here we see a lot more detail has been added, including the side boxes with their plasan armour plates along with aerial fittings and boxes

I had to scratch build the cover over the gunners sight

You can see how much use I've made of the pinch and die set to create the bolt heads and various other fittings. The aerial mounts were scratch built around some brass fittings I got from RB Models.

I'm retty happy with the turret now, so as soon as I've got those last two fittings done it will be time to paint. This is where I think I've made a mistake in that painting the pierced armour plates is going to be tricky to avoid blocking up the holes. That and painting the surface UNDERNEATH the armour - I may need to take it off again to paint underneath first! Oh well you live and learn...

Edited May 8, 2014 by Kallisti

[Alpha Delta 210]

Incredible attention to detail - I'm loving this!

[Kallisti]

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...

[snapper_city]

Looking good Andrew.. Shame she won't be ready for Monday evening.

[Kallisti]

Not this month but it should be ready for June instead. I've got a model for the table on Monday though, something I finished a couple of months ago but forgot to bring...

[heloman1]

I keep opening this thread hoping to see a Supermarine Scimitar!!! However I realise your building a something that could actually do a job! Not that I don't like either I just like the lines of the other one better. But then I'm a plane nut

Keep up the good work.

Colin

[Kallisti]

Haha, I do the opposite - keep seeing threads about Scimitars and it turns out to have wings instead of tracks

[Kallisti]

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

[Alpha Delta 210]

Wow, that's coming along really well. 10 packs of Evergreen strip? You're a more patient man than I!

Keep it up!

[Kallisti]

I might be overdoing the order (there was a discount for 10+) a bit but just one of those panels takes up around 2 1/2 strips. Then last night I built a second set to replace these which have turned out looking much better since I'm now more experienced with the best ways to align the bars. There is always a learning curve to work out the best and most accurate way to do this stuff, so there is bound to be some wastage. What you see there is pretty much 3/4 of packet of strips and these are some of the smaller panels. The hull ones might be a bit narrower but are much taller..

[Kallisti]

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!

[Alpha Delta 210]

That bar armour looks amazing! It certainly knocks the socks off the Airfix Warrior armour! Great work as always.

[foxy]

Good to see you have got the bar armour up to scratch

Thats looking real good

Cheers foxy

[Kallisti]

Thanks foxy

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!)