This is the old Dragon 60cm Morser. Posting here for those not following the Armor GB.
I took all the running gear from the trees and cleaned them up and separated them for assembly. Lots of parts!
Parts cleaned up and sorted
The hull is a tad long.
The beast is taking shape…
Have most of the major components on the superstructure assembled and glued.
This is the usual Dragon “where in the heck does this go?” build since the instructions are vague here and there. One has to do some dry fitting first to determine how the parts go on. One of the bolts had to be thinned down cause it would not fit against a particular part, usual Dragon oops moment but easily corrected.
The top is ready for the smaller details yet to come.
Even tough the punch out marks are under the platforms, they can still be seen since they attach very high up on the superstructure. A little PPP will fill them very easily.
This is how the side platforms sit.
The HUGE mufflers were assembled and cleaned up. The pipes were carefully drilled out with a hand held drill bit.
Thanks for taking the time to post your comment. It sure looks a lot bigger than the usual 1/35 scale armor kit. Can you picture this thing in 1/24 scale ? [:|]
I have run into a questionable area just below the gun mechanism where Dragon left it as one big empty cavity. The gun would recoil into this area once elevated and fired.
I suspect this area was boxed in. I finally found something online showing this detail that needs to be built from plastic sheet.
Looks like painting will be next. Don’t know which scheme to go with, either boring Panzer Grey or the brighter tri color.
I used up some of those junk plastic advertisement cards we get in the mail to fill in the area Dragon left vacant. In reality it would have gone further down into the hull but for simplicity’s sake this will do. This area is barely visible anyway.
The kit includes a metal 60cm projectile.
The tracks, mufflers and road wheels will get painted soon.
The beast is ready for paint.
The driver’s cabin.
The seat bottom and instruments will be attached later on after painting.
The loading sled will get the hairspray weathering trick.
Thanks fellas. I started this morning spraying the German Yellow as a base for the tri color scheme. This thing is gonna use a lot of paint and several airbrushing sessions.
Spent most of the day painting the German Yellow color. The bottom part is MM enamel and the top is Vallejo acrylic. The MM enamel paint is a tad lighter so I still have to go back and re touch some parts and even out the two colors. The flash makes the top look darker than what it really is.
The top took almos 3/4 of the Vallejo bottle. I have a few Vallejo paints so I wanted to try it out here but I’m not 100% liking it over enamels. It took several sessions and the AB was partially clogged a couple of times even with 3-4 drops of thinner to 10 drops of paint. Vallejo recommends 1-2 drops of tinner per 10 of paint. I also added double the dose on the flow improver which helped but again, nothing like the ease of using enamels.
The mufflers were shot with Alclad and MM metalizers.
The 2.3 ton projectile was sprayed MM RLM70 enamel then given a polish with a soft cotton rag and the least amount of Rub N Buff for a metallic tone. It still needs additional weathering. The darn thing looks like a Ma Deuce slug.
Size comparison of the projectile. I also picked up a nice pre made wood base at HL for $5. Not worth the hassle of breaking out my wood tools to make one.
I was thinking about that projectile and how big it is; then realized it’s much bigger than the projectile used on the Bismarck battleship - 38cm to 60cm. They must have had a convoy of trucks hauling these projectiles, because I don’t see a lot of storage room for them. Very interesting this beast!
Wow, it is big and beautiful. You have done alot but there is still much more to do. Are you planning on adding figures or doing anything more to the HL base? Is it a smoothbore or it there rigling in the bore?
I got the old 1/72 Hasegawa kit (unbuilt). I may have to try it in 1/35 some day as yours is really nice.
Thanks Bruce. Yea I think the support team was huge along with the actual gunners. From what I read the beast was partially dismantelled, loaded on to a train to its destination then reassembled and driving this monster to the designated firing area.
Thanks Ben. I have barely started to detail this thing. It still needs the green and red brown paint. The biggest PITA will be painting the rubber part on the return rollers, all 12 of them. It has rifling in the barrel and that interior part needs paint too. Once I have the tracks assembled and painted then I will be able to mount them on and start working on the base terrain but that is still far away.
If memory serves, there was a heavily modified PzKfz IV that had a box that looked a lot like a Möbilwagen with a crane to hoist the shells out. Even then, that only held line 10 or 12 (just not remembering which).
The whole thing was slung on a speciall railway carrage and moved bodily from place to place. So, like as not, the ammo was in boxcars attached to the train.
