Mk1 gun carrier scratchbuild

[Model Mate]

1 hour ago, Bullbasket said:

Wow!! Just catching up on this (hence all of the likes), and my gob is well and truly smacked. I like a bit of scratch building and some riveting, but you've taken this to a whole new level. It's a master class. Keep going (at least until the men in white coats come calling!)

 

John.

Thanks John - Haha! yes....... "they're coming to take me away.." might not be far off once all I can see is rivets. I've got Chas and Dave ringing in my ears......"rivet...rivet...rivet...rivet...rivet rivet rivet rivet" etc.

[Model Mate]

Haha! how timely..! my last message pushed me up to "obsessed member". Very appropriate.

[Bertie McBoatface]

9 minutes ago, Model Mate said:

Haha! how timely..! my last message pushed me up to "obsessed member". Very appropriate.

 

Congratulations! 

 

[Marklo]

Lovely work, I’ve scratched a St Chamond, a Schneider and an A7V using pretty much the same method and am working on a K-Wagen at the moment.  Although I think unlike your builds I tend to bail in and then fix it with filler  

 

St Chamond
 

Sturmpanzer A7V

 

Schneider CA1
 

The full collection.

 

The Behemoth the K-Wagen

 

[Model Mate]

14 hours ago, Marklo said:

Lovely work, I’ve scratched a St Chamond, a Schneider and an A7V using pretty much the same method and am working on a K-Wagen at the moment.  Although I think unlike your builds I tend to bail in and then fix it with filler  

 

St Chamond
 

Sturmpanzer A7V

 

Schneider CA1
 

The full collection.

 

The Behemoth the K-Wagen

 

Hi Marklo, I've followed your builds with interest - it's good to have another WW1 scratcher in the group. Loving your current monster!

[Model Mate]

I stuck the “foot” together and added some further detail to the sled part.

 

This project lends itself very much to the idea of sub-assemblies – I’ve got the ramp/sled part, the cabs, main lower body (tracks and bottom plate), rear superstructure, interior (engine and gearbox) and the gun. To keep it interesting and to avoid rivet-blindness/madness, this is a good thing, and I can flip between each sub-model to keep things fresh. With this in mind, I made a start on the bottom hull parts. The main parts were drilled, scored and cut out. There is a thin raised riveted edge on both the outside and inside track sections, and these were drilled out (so many holes..!) and cut from 0.5mm card. The centre spacer frame was made from 0.75mm card and is a bit floppy – not the finest construction, but as it won’t be seen, I’m hoping that won’t matter too much.

 

I got some silicone mixed up and poured the moulds for the track plates and rivet strips. I also need a whole bunch of little roller wheels for the gun ramp/sled, so I took the best 4 of the rather poor ones I’d made earlier from tube and rod and added these to the track link mould before I poured it.

 

As usual I mixed it a bit “lean” so it took a while to set. The advantage of this is no bubbles at least. It’ll need a bit of a clean up, but seems to have worked pretty well on the whole.

 

I decided that the roller wheels really weren’t likely to be good enough, so bit the bullet and came up with another way to make them. I punched out a series of 4mm, 3mm and 2.5mm circles using a simple hole punch. It’s not a great piece of kit – cheapo thing from Wilco -  and the edges all needed a bit of clean up. I could really do with a proper punch set, but this will have to do for now. I was pretty pleased with the result all things considered.

 

These wheels were fixed onto the gun ramp along with the foot and the sled part. I’m really pleased with this so far.

 

[robw_uk]

gob-smacked.... this is stunning work

[Model Mate]

4 minutes ago, robw_uk said:

gob-smacked.... this is stunning work

Thanks Rob, that means a lot. I'm really having a good time with this - sticking little bits of plastic together to detail these sorts of parts is great fun!

[Model Mate]

And so back to the cabs – it’s really nice to be able to bounce around the various sub-assemblies as I fancied a bit of relief from all those rivets!

 

I made up a pair of floor boxes to mount the seats and fixed these onto long plates that run into the rear superstructure. In fact, they may be a bit too long. I guess the card model needs the extra support, but from section drawings I have, this appears to be a bit of a simplification so I may snip them a bit shorter. The right cab houses the brake/lever man, whilst the left contains the driver – how they coordinated and managed to drive this thing successfully I’ve no idea.

 

I made the seats up from bent 1.0mm silver wire and plasticard and added curved floor boxes cut from some plastic tube. Handles were made using 1.0mm wire with 0.4mm wire wrapped around the ends to simulate the handgrips. I’ve put some rather modern-arrangement pedals on the driver’s side, but whether the usual throttle, clutch and brake pedals were really there is pure speculation – probably not, but the cabs look a bit barren without a bit of extra detail. I’m sure there would have been a collection of switches, valves and knobs, but I’ve no idea what. I’ll have a look at the Haynes “WW1 British tank” manual and see if I can pick up any clues there.

 

The wheel was a bit of a challenge – I do have a reasonable photo of this, and it clearly has a number of spokes rather than the simpler 3 or four spoke arrangement. I bent some 0.7mm silver wire around a knife handle and glued the ends. The centre was a circle cut out of 0.2mm plasticard with the spokes cut out. A small section of plastic tube was superglued to the top of the wire column to allow a decent plastic-on-plastic join where the Tamiya extra thin could do its job rather than rely on more superglue.

 

And so I turned my attention to the interior. I’ve got some reasonable photos of the Daimler engine so should be able to scratch it acceptably; the cardboard template engine is pretty basic. I may try to have the superstructure removable to see the interior, but we’ll see when I get to that stage. I still want to detail the inside as best I can anyway, just ‘cause it’s fun.

I started with the differential – a huge flywheel contraption. I cut a series of circles from 0.75mm card and fixed them onto a 3mm tube. The curvy shapes between these will be formed with milliput.

 

[NIK122]

This is fantastic. Following with interest 

[Maginot]

Great project. What a fabulously ugly and ungainly subject. Following your fabrication techniques, the logical breakdown into sub-assemblies, the slow and steady progress of the construction... it's a real treat. You're so well organised that you make it look easy. We know it isn't.

 

Oh... and I'm convinced that you've got a rivet fetish 🤓

[Model Mate]

37 minutes ago, Maginot said:

Great project. What a fabulously ugly and ungainly subject. Following your fabrication techniques, the logical breakdown into sub-assemblies, the slow and steady progress of the construction... it's a real treat. You're so well organised that you make it look easy. We know it isn't.

 

Oh... and I'm convinced that you've got a rivet fetish 🤓

Haha! Not a fetish, but certainly becoming an obsession! Funnily though, as I do more of these riveted builds, the less bogged down I get with the rivets. I’ve got quite quick at it now and it’s one of those nice, easy repetitive jobs that suit watching telly at the same time. Drilling all the holes is a bit of a ball-ache though….

[THEscaleSHOW]

On 21/01/2022 at 12:03, Model Mate said:

Off to a slow start….

 

In an effort to avoid complete mental collapse, I’ve decided I need to find ways to reduce the rivet count in the build-up of this beast and so my first thought was “what bits can I cast in resin?”. When there are only two or three similar parts I tend to scratch each one, but where I have smaller items that repeat more than this, I consider breaking out the silicone and resin.

 

For this one, there don’t appear to be too many components that are repeated unfortunately. There are the track links, which are a no-brainer for casting, and “trolley” wheels/rollers for the gun frame (which I’ll need to research a little to determine quite what they look like in detail). There are also, in the cardboard-template kit I have to work from, a number of applique rivetted strips – 3mm wide with either single or double rows of rivets. 

 

After splurging out on my new tiny, tiny balls and even tinier drill bits, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that the 0.8mm nail caviar I used for my last build is appropriate for this vehicle after all. 0.8mm scales up to 28mm in real life, which doesn’t seem unreasonable at all for a heavily armoured tank like this. A bit much for the thinly armoured Pierce Arrow, but fine for this I think….. anyone out there know what size WW1 tank rivets are/were?

 

Track links first: I cut a strip of 0.5mm card the correct width of the tracks, marked out positions for the (flattened) rivets with a pin and drilled holes using a 1mm bit. Lengths of rod were pushed in and set to a regular height by pushing it face-down onto the world’s simplest jig of 0.2mm card to get the penetrations regular – the aim is to get them just proud of the plate. A slosh of TET and snipping off the back bits and (almost) done. They just need sanding at the back to remove the stubs, adding the leading curve and cutting into individual links. When I first tried this track-link casting for my Whippet, I only made 4 prototypes, so had to cast at least 50 times (50% success rate), so in order to reduce the number of casts, I’m making up 12 links this time, with 8 of them in a strip, and 4 individuals. Say 160 links at 50% success should mean no more than 26 castings which is a big improvement.

 

 

Next up, the applique strips. I cut (3mm wide by 0.5mm card) and drilled (0.7mm holes) the first one at a random (but longer than the longest needed) length. The whole strip was glued down onto a slightly wider 0.2mm card strip and the balls were glued into place. The idea of the 0.2mm backing is to provide a guide in sanding them down to the correct thickness. I’ve found when using a single-face “open” mould, that the resin will need sanding back, so this “flash” should give a guide as to when to stop. I’ll use the same plan for the track links.

 

 

Top and clean work so far and very good choice of this model!!

MD

[Bullbasket]

Each item is a mini masterpiece on it's own. Brilliant work.

 

John.

[Model Mate]

Into the engine room!

 

I took my exotic bobbin, cut a strangely shaped piece of 0.75mm card to represent the flange running around the centre and glued this onto the discs and centre tube. I took the opportunity to try the Tamiya airbrush cleaner for this. I’d heard (maybe here on BM, I can’t remember) that this stuff is exactly the same as Tamiya extra thin cement, but cheaper as it come in a much bigger bottle. I can confirm that it isn’t exactly the same, but in fact, for my purposes, better. It smells slightly different, but is very volatile and works on ABS plastic (the tubes I have) as well as polystyrene, which is a real result.

 

I cut some short sections of tube, flattened them on one side and glued pairs together for the cylinders. The “skeleton” of the engine was formed using a flange centre section, and rectangular top and bottom plates, separated with scraps of card.

 

I smeared plenty of white milliput over these formers, keeping just shy of the flange edges and smoothed it using lots of water. With the left over milliput (there’s always some isn’t there, and I hate to waste it) I rolled out a manifold shape. Once dry, I sanded them all, adding a bit of Tippex as a final filler to fill in the minor nicks and ridges which was also sanded back of course. I knocked up the engine frame from the card instructions and here’s how it looks together, with the cylinders dry-fitted. They had little blobs of left over milliput pushed into the tops to form the dished heads of each cylinder.

 

I’ve now started adding the various nuts, bolts, plates and so on onto the engine block using scraps of card, tube, rod and hexagonal tube. It won’t be the most refined or accurate engine possible but it’s great fun and It’s coming together.

 

 

[ColonelKrypton]

10 hours ago, Model Mate said:

Tamiya airbrush cleaner

Interesting comments.

 

Sometime ago I had heard the same story that Tamiya airbrush cleaner and Tamiya Extra Thin Cement where for all intents and purposes the same thing.

 

Material safety data sheets ( MSDS or now more commonly just SDS ) are a good resource and can be helpful to sort out such things.  After a bit of searching around I managed to find SDS's for Tamiya Extra Thin Cement ( dark green cap), Tamiya Extra Thin Quick Dry Cement ( light green cap ), and Tamiya Airbrush Cleaner.

 

The SDS for Tamiya Extra Thin ( dark green cap ) and Tamiya Airbrush Cleaner indicate that they are essentially the same thing - the Extra Thin being 50% acetone and 50% butyl acetate  whereas the airbrush cleaner is 51% acetone and 49% butyl acetate.  I would expect that they would or should have the same odour. 

 

Tamiya Extra Thin Quick Dry Cement ( light green cap ) is very different being 40% acetone, 40% ethyl acetate and 20% butanon ( aka methyl ethyl ketone or MEK ) and I would expect that it would have a very different smell compared to the extra thin or airbrush cleaner.

 

Incidentally, according to the SDS's Tamiya Cement ( white cap ) is very similar to the Extra Thin (light green cap) but with the addition of a couple of other solvents ( 10% ) and 11% polystyrene resin.

 

The transmission and engine for your MK1 gun carrier are starting to look the part, nicely done.

 

cheers, Graham

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bertie McBoatface]

This is fascinating. You are very creative.

[Model Mate]

Thanks for the feedback folks - very much appreciated! Not much progress to report I’m afraid – life and work getting in the way of the really important things!

 

Work continues (slowly) on the engine and differential. The latter got a few bolts and plates added and I moved on to the retaining bolts/brackets.

 

I started cutting pieces for the brackets from 0.75mm card with the intention of laminating these three-thick and then carving and sanding them into a smooth, cast shape.

 

 

But I soon realised that this wasn’t the best way to proceed – the circular cuts vary quite a lot due to the only roughly circular and tapering shape of the milliput body these will need to be fitted onto. I’ll scrap this idea and laminate the card before drilling a large hole and then cutting, carving and shaping the overall brackets.

 

As a bit of light relief I picked up a nostalgia build diversion at the recent Bovington model show – I've a voucher for a tank driving day courtesy of my wonderful girlfriend and I believe this is what I'll be piloting. I met some very nice people, saw some great models and thoroughly enjoyed the whole place; somewhere I’ve never visited before believe it or not!....oh, and I checked rivet sizes – about an inch on a typical British WW1 tank as far as I can tell, so the 0.8mm balls are looking good for scale.

 

 

Back at the desk, I broke out the green stuff and faired in the various plates and tubes that stick out of the differential and added some cushions to the seats.

 

Finally, the engine continued with various bolts, pipes and plates. Nearly there with this bit…..

 

 

[ColonelKrypton]

On 2/25/2022 at 6:08 AM, Model Mate said:

oh, and I checked rivet sizes – about an inch on a typical British WW1 tank as far as I can tell, so the 0.8mm balls are looking good for scale.

 

Good to know.  I guessing that would be about right judging from pictures and comparing different size rivets on models as to what "looked right".  On my Poplavko armoured car I went with 0.030" (0.75mm) rivets as they "looked right". Some looked smaller in pictures and for those I used 0.025" ( 0.65mm ) rivets and some others smaller than that.

 

Sometimes on models, something like a rivet or bolt head that is sized for scale fidelity does not always "look right" - sometimes something a bit bigger or a bit smaller looks better and bit of variation adds a bit of visual interest as well.

 

The motive power bits are really starting to come together and once painted and weathered are going to look the part. 

 

cheers, Graham

 

[Maginot]

Goodness! The diff, engine and seats are better than bought ones.

[LeeM]

Absolutely fantastic work. You  will love the Scorpion.

Edited March 2, 2022 by LeeM

[THEscaleSHOW]

On 25/02/2022 at 12:08, Model Mate said:

Thanks for the feedback folks - very much appreciated! Not much progress to report I’m afraid – life and work getting in the way of the really important things!

 

Work continues (slowly) on the engine and differential. The latter got a few bolts and plates added and I moved on to the retaining bolts/brackets.

 

I started cutting pieces for the brackets from 0.75mm card with the intention of laminating these three-thick and then carving and sanding them into a smooth, cast shape.

 

 

But I soon realised that this wasn’t the best way to proceed – the circular cuts vary quite a lot due to the only roughly circular and tapering shape of the milliput body these will need to be fitted onto. I’ll scrap this idea and laminate the card before drilling a large hole and then cutting, carving and shaping the overall brackets.

 

As a bit of light relief I picked up a nostalgia build diversion at the recent Bovington model show – I've a voucher for a tank driving day courtesy of my wonderful girlfriend and I believe this is what I'll be piloting. I met some very nice people, saw some great models and thoroughly enjoyed the whole place; somewhere I’ve never visited before believe it or not!....oh, and I checked rivet sizes – about an inch on a typical British WW1 tank as far as I can tell, so the 0.8mm balls are looking good for scale.

 

 

Back at the desk, I broke out the green stuff and faired in the various plates and tubes that stick out of the differential and added some cushions to the seats.

 

Finally, the engine continued with various bolts, pipes and plates. Nearly there with this bit…..

 

 

Great work and that without 3d printer 👍

MD

[heloman1]

An interesting subject. Always happy to watch some scratch building. I haven't read all the comment above so if I'm repeating this, apologies.

Regarding the rivets and the nail caviar. Archers in the US produce resin printed rivet decals in various sizes. They are waterslide decals and look excellent when applied and save time too. Probably available from a model railway supplier. Then HWG (?) in Europe produce the same, aimed to the 1/32nd scale WWI. Similarly if you haven't found it already EMA Model Supplies in Feltham supply hexagonal styrene rod, which is a good scratch builder need.

I'll follow your build with interest.

 

Colin

[ErikT]

Having scratchbuilt precisely one thing in my life, I have a healthy respect and awe of the skill and patience it takes to make something of this calibre.  Amazing work so far, and I will definitely keep checking in on this build as you progress.  Love the old iron beasts of WW1.

[Model Mate]

15 hours ago, heloman1 said:

An interesting subject. Always happy to watch some scratch building. I haven't read all the comment above so if I'm repeating this, apologies.

Regarding the rivets and the nail caviar. Archers in the US produce resin printed rivet decals in various sizes. They are waterslide decals and look excellent when applied and save time too. Probably available from a model railway supplier. Then HWG (?) in Europe produce the same, aimed to the 1/32nd scale WWI. Similarly if you haven't found it already EMA Model Supplies in Feltham supply hexagonal styrene rod, which is a good scratch builder need.

I'll follow your build with interest.

 

Colin

Thanks Colin. I had a look at the Archer and HWG options and they look pretty good, but with the number of rivets this beast carries, they work out quite pricey I think - I’m a real skinflint when it comes to model making; so much so that I resent having to pay more than a few quid for a kit these days! That said, I did lash out on some hex rod in a variety of sizes and it’s been really useful of late.