All seems to have gone reasonably well with the totem pole project, time will tell when tracks go on, projections twenty twenty something... and when the ground has dried out preferably.
So lately I've been slowly working my way down the "port side" at a snails pace. Problem is the longer you look at pictures of the original, the more you see, "Geeez" "how am I going to make that" comes to mind.
There's all sorts little brackets and moldings around the mud guards, a lot is covered by the bins and the tow rope, but I thought I'd have a go, Not sure how the fasteners and fittings are going to go on these brackets. Glue and screw seems preferable.
Another problem is scale, one part made and fitted to correct scale position interacts not so well with other parts and positions, a good example is the tow rope. It looks great, but it is slightly bigger and shorter than normal, adding detail bits didn't help, it will tuck in, but it's tight. Tethering the original tank tow rope along the mud guard at the angle box end should be further on the front casting. But that would mean clipping the angle bin on the model, the bin it'self is then short and so on.
I'm finding that unless your prepared to remake a lot of the original model parts it'll be tricky and I might come a cropper.
I feel a "Banksy or Leonardo" coming on. (Artistic Licence)
Other fittings,
Using Brute force and ignorance, I've made alloy half round for the mud guard moldings from aluminium welding rod. It's lined up in lengths and taped down to a block of wood, I use masking tape as it does not melt. Then carefully go grinding away with the dependable angle grinder, replenish the tape to keep holding the rods down, crude I know, but an effective cheap way of getting reasonable length of half round aluminium rod around 3mm wide.
Other fittings are just filed from extruded aluminium shapes brought from the B&Q metal molding area.
A few welds and fills to finish later and I'm slowly getting back to the front end where I was 6 months ago.
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