Unfortunately my headlong charge towards completing
some vehicles for the 70’s US force hit a snag round about Christmas and has
since ground to a halt….
Everything was going quite well initially, I fired
through one of the super S-Models M551 Sheridans in jig time; it’s a lovely
little model, although comments re: thin gun barrels and fiddly PE parts from
the BRDM still apply.
I replaced the plastic .50 cal with a metal Elhiem
one, which should be slightly sturdier, and finished the beast off with some
stowage…
Then it was onto the painting of winter MERDC, the
bit I’d been looking forward to. And damn did it look good
However, following this, the next stage was the
application of gloss varnish ahead of the oil wash. And that’s when the wheels
came off. Due to the cold temperatures, I’d decided to set up a spray booth in
the loft, because I was too impatient to wait until the warmer weather to spray
up the vehicles (after all the whole idea was to do this through the winter and
keep up the inspiration for the theme. Seems to have been justified since I’m
still waiting for warmer weather…!), and up until now it seemed to have worked.
But this time, having allowed the varnish to dry, I found that the cold
temperature had caused it to wrinkle and bubble the paint beneath it
The pictures don’t really show the full extent of
how bad this looks. This left me with a coupe of options; 1) leave it as is and
cover up the imperfections with weathering/stowage/ foliage/ cam net or 2)
strip it all back and start again. I decided against the former, however I’d
got so pissed off with what had happened that I couldn’t bring myself to start
stripping it all back, so the tank has just sat on my work bench, silently judging
me ever since. Looking at it now, I reckon I can probably try a local fix by
just scraping/stripping the affected areas and just doing a touch up job, but
that may well be very much trial and error…
In better news though, I did obtain a couple of
Elhiem’s new dismounted US Cold War Tank crew. Although designed with the late
80s in mind, with a bit of judicious hacking and filing, they should suit my
purpose admirably, and at least let me continue with this project until I pluck
up the courage to restart that Sheridan!
Cheers
Iain
