Roco Minitanks T-34

Modeling Subjects Armor
1

I know this isn’t one of those great, superdetailed masterpieces usually posted here, but I just love doing these little things. It’s an HO scale Roco Minitanks T-34. The only modification I made was to move the periscope from its original position to the top of the turret. Judging from the online picture research I did, there are still several inaccuracies here. Basic paint is Tamiya acrylics, with some Testor’s enamel for some of the details. I (obviously) hand-painted the cyrillic ‘for the motherland’ on the sides, and used a little Tamiya weathering kit to make it look a little used. The weathering really turned out very nice with very little effort. I really like the look! The whole thing probably took me about 3 hours, mostly spent erasing the seams, filling ejector pin marks, etc. Lots of fun, gave me the chance to try out some new methods. Thought you’d enjoy the results.

2

How much did the kit cost??[?] How many parts??

There sure isn’t alot of detail on those tracks or anywhere else on that tank for that matter. But I guess it’s a great model to try things out on.[:)]

3

I think the kit has eleven parts (three fuel tanks, upper and lower hull halves, two tracks/ running gear, bow MG, turret, gun, commander’s hatch) but remember that it comes ready-assembled. the price varies according to where you buy them (the T-34s are OOP at the moment), but $US11.00 is typical.

I wasn’t aware that the Soviets painted T-34s in Olive Drab, and thought that this:

is rather closer to Soviet WW2 armour green. I also don’t think I’ve ever seen a real tank with black tracks. Come to think of it, I also think that this:

is rather closer to a T-34/76. Never mind - right number of tracks, I suppose.

Cheers,

Chris.

4

You’re right about the colors - they did come out a little darker than intended. The tracks aren’t black, they’re Testor’s gunmetal. The bottle’s 30 years old and seems to have darkened. I may have misjudged the hull color a little as well - the few color pics I found of new production tanks looked closer to the dark olive drab. My practice is to model something as new rather than roughly battle- and weather-worn. Thanks for the feedback.

5

Comanche - I love Roco Minitanks. I grew up in Germany in the 1960s, on Hohne, a british army base on the Luneberg Heath. I would go into the nearest town - Celle - every Saturday, and often I would spend my pocket money on a Minitank. At the time, they were the best small-scale model military vehicles available, and they had a huge range.

Some thoughts about how you might make your tanks better. First, try painting the tracks and wheels off the vehicle. With Minitanks this is easy. Dark/ meduim greys work quite well for tracks - not so much dark metallic colours such as gunmetal. You can then dry-brush them with rusty colours (though tank tracks don’t rust as much as people think they do, especially if you use gate guardians or museum exhibits as references). Alternatively, you can dry-brush them lightly with dull steel colours, or rub them with pencil lead. Also, many tanks have rubber track pads, and you can paint them dark grey.

Many tanks - such as your T-34/76 - have rubber road wheels. In 1/72 and smaller, I find it easiest to paint these with thinned very dark grey acrylic paint and a fine-tipped brush. Keep some damp cotton buds handy so that if you get paint wher you don’t want it - and you will, we all do - you can remove it quickly and start over.

Paint the rest of the tank when you’ve painted the running gear and added it to the vehicle. If you want, you can protect the paint job with Tamiya masking tape, like this:

I’m not going to go into techniques for painting tanks - huge amounts have been written on this subject, but if you’d like help on a specific topic, please feel free to contact me off-board. I would, howeve, say that most paint ranges have colours specifically intended for painting tanks of a particular country and period (in your case, this would be WW2 Soviet armour green) and it’s usually a good idea to use these colours, at least as a starting point.

Finally,your model lwould look a lot better if you filled the seams. There are visible seams at the rear of the hull on your model, and you can easily use superglue, accelerator and sandpaper to fill them and clean them up.

A final point - if the colours on your photos come out darker than you hope, it is usually possible to use the processing software that came with your camera to make them look lighter.

Keep showing us your work - it would be great to see how you improve.

Cheers,

Chris.