Making a dent in Christmas additions

[LankyPanky]

After a rather fruitful Christmas modelling wise I decided it was high time to start chipping away at the pile I had acquired over the festive period. The Eduard Samurai set and the 109 have been stored in the ever growing pile, and with the intention of starting the 1:144 Lightning later in the year it is the Tamiya Matilda that will be he subject of this thread. I might add that this was a present bought for myself... by myself. This would also have the added benefit of coinciding with my IPMS branch group build for the start of the year; the subject of which was desert warfare.

 

 

Being a vaguely recent kit from Tamiya it of course slots together in the usual fashion and even features some cast texture on the hull and turret. 

 

 

This was to be my first time using link and length tracks and for all I was a bit daunted by this prospect the process actually went relatively smoothly. owing to the fact that the Matilda has track armour/skirt I decided to work a bit smarter and opted to just model the tracks that were going to be visible. 

 

 

After a small amount of test fitting this turned out to work perfectly and means that unless you're a small child or Bilbo Baggins you don't really stand much of a chance of up skirting this beauty. The rest of the  build followed in the regular Tamiya fashion. I left most of the tools and gizmos off of the hull to help with painting later.

 

 

In the next instalment im going o be painting this one up in the blue desert wonder tha is the caunter camo sceme, so rest assured lots of masking is on its way.

 

Until next time

 

JC

[Geo1966]

A good start on a great Tamiya kit JC. I think you will find that blue listed in the instructions is wrong. Maybe do a search on here for other Matilda's or Caunter scheme.

 

George

[LankyPanky]

4 hours ago, Geo1966 said:

A good start on a great Tamiya kit JC. I think you will find that blue listed in the instructions is wrong. Maybe do a search on here for other Matilda's or Caunter scheme.

 

George

Thanks for the heads up on that one George! I'll have a gander

 

JC

[LankyPanky]

It's been a slow few weeks on this one! 

 

Once the build was at a point where paint could be applied a basecoat of Citadels Chaos Black was applied from a rattle can. Sadly I forgot to take any good pictures of it at this point, despite that fact that a base coated model is one of the sleekest things o look at in my opinion. Anyways after this I started applying the first of the colours, A.MIG -029 Desert Sand and it was one of he thinnest colours I have ever had the displeasure of painting. It took what was probably upwards of five coats to get anything vaguely presentable down on the model. This obviously knocked back my imagined timescales for his model back a fair bit. The turret is at a stage to move onto masking and the next colours but he body of the tank is still getting a consistent coat put down. 

 

I'm unsure as to whether all of this was down to a dud bottle of paint or just my miscalculation of putting down a black basecoat. Who knows???

 

The masking for this scheme would have been made a hell of a lot easier had I left of most of the accessories for the turret that got in the way a fair bit. Think i just got a bit trigger happy with the cutters 😆

 

 

Got the first couple of coats of A.MIG-063 RLM 76 PALE GREY down for the blueish colour that the caunter scheme is famed for. A couple of coats down and its going a lot better than the previous colour.

 

Hopefully some speedier progress can be made now to get it ready for the end of the GB this is for

 

Until next time

 

JC

[Keeff]

Looking good so far. It's a shame you had an issue with the sand colour ... unusual for mig paints! 

 

Keith 😁 

 

[LankyPanky]

12 hours ago, Keeff said:

Looking good so far. It's a shame you had an issue with the sand colour ... unusual for mig paints! 

 

Keith 😁 

 

Yeah I was a bit confused myself. After doing a bit of research, however, it looks like the blue will definitely have to be toned down a fair bit as the actual colour is more of a slate grey. A mistake apparently made by Bovington in the 60's that's been copied ever since.

 

JC