Construction - Final Fender Prep and Priming
Our plasticard cuts were good, but not perfect leaving a very obvious construction joint. Some sanding and shaping was therefore required to make sure the profile didn’t look like we just stuck a sheet of plasticard to the underside of the mudguard. We used a range of abrasives between files, emery boards, a #1000 grit sanding pen and #1500 grit sanding sponge, angling critically in a way that we could sand down the plasticard without eating into the base plastic.
Recall that since the model is to be a paint mule and will likely be stripped in the future, we can’t simply use putty filler so the finish could only be achieved with Tamiya Extra Thin Cement and abrasives. Once my Tamiya Extra Thin has been drawn down it’ll probably become a sprue-goo factory, because molten polystyrene had proven useful in other aspects of this build.
The Red Oxide Tamiya Fine Surface Primer went down nicely. After I started my Panther with a TS-3 Dark Yellow, I’d seen a number of YouTube videos which almost always started with a Red Oxide primer. It happens to be a close match to the factory primer in which German tanks rolled off the assembly line, over which base colour such as a Dunkelgrau, Dunkelgelb or Olivegrun were subsequently applied depending on the year of manufacture.
We were most curious to see how our mudguard infill looked after our plasticard patching. While it’s probably not as good as it could have been, the outcome is far less noticeable than the crater in the undersides of the mud guards has been taken care of. If anything our errors and gouges have created some interesting surface texture…
This weekend follows a couple of hectic weeks, and a few jobs to catch up on, but hopefully there’ll be some more channelling of my inner Bob @Toimi_Tom … Love that clip!