The Model Box

Breaking out the Crusaders. British crusader tanks that is. Two from Armourfast (Mk ll) and one from Hasegawa (Mk lll)

Armourfast 1:72 M4A2 Sherman quick build kit. Each box has 2 tanks and is engineered to be very fast and simple to assemble, mainly for wargamers. The third tank shown with the two M4A2s is the Matchbox 1:76 Firefly.

Painting and weathering four of these fast-build wargaming models for a DAK scenario. After priming and base painting with Tamiya Dark Yellow, a light dry brush of a lighter shade of yellow is scrubbed in. The first set of drybrushing was followed by a light wash of earth brown using illustration ink. Another shade of brown ink followed. I'm currently using inks from Magic Color. The roadwheels got a bit messy -- a disadvantage of the quick-build tracks is that they come as one assembly and it gets hard to reach parts to paint -- but I'll clean and retouch them with my next round of dry brushing. In the meantime, the models will be left to dry properly so I don't mess up the ink where they've pooled nicely. More touchups this weekend. I'll be adding stowage and decals soon too.

 I decided to work on something a bit simpler and stepped away from the Jagdtiger project for the moment. I normally post my wargaming stuff on Men in Boxes but I decided that since the topic was more on making a simple tank kit, maybe they'd be better off here. What I've unboxed here are two boxes of Armourfast's quick-build Pz Kpfw III Aus G's in 1/72 scale. The kits are very, very simple to build with just the chassis, the left and right tracks and road wheels, the hull, turret and gun making up the parts, aside from a few detailing stuff. You'de need to clean up some mold lines but these are very minimal. Aligning the tracks and roadwheel assemblies will entail some eyeballing with reference material as essential since there are no locator pins. The same goes for the little pasrts that attach to the superstructure and turrets. Armourfast  didn't provide locator holes for any:( I built up two boxes worth in an hour and primed and sprayed them a de...

 I decided to start a 1/72 Deutsche Afrika Korps wargaming army and the first AFV model I ordered from Hannants UK were a few boxes of the Armourfast Pz. Kpw. III Aus G. Each box contains two tanks and are designed to be used mainly for wargames, thus are easily assembled. Inside the box are two sprues, with parts for each tank on one each. A separate small sprue molded in grey holds the new side skirts. These will go to my bitz box.   There are no decals, no painting instructions and the like, only a simple assembly diagram on the box.   The instruction diagrams however aren't very helpful though so you'll need to know your way around a Panzer III:) I had a problem aligning the tracks. Both parts do not have alignment hubs. I ended up eyeballing them and glued each track one at a time to get the distance right. Another problem was that the roadwheels dont really touch the hull and they end up floating unattached. If you try to glue them to the hull, the tracks wil...