Hi guys, after completing the King tiger I gave the shop a good cleaning and quickly bumped off this Dragon Schwimmwagen kit. Due to time constraints I built the kit mostly out of the box, but I did add several scratch built components to further enhance what the kit gives you.
The kit itself is a mostly simple build, but the instructions on these early Dragon 1/6th scale kits are some what vague and take some detective work to piece together. But the parts do fit and assemble well.
The one portion of the kit that I did scratch build was the wooden floor boards. The kit supplied floor boards are molded into the interior pan. Rather than attempting to replicate the wood color I fabricated the wooden floor boards out of real wood instead. The front portions of the floor boards are hinged with a set of old small doll house hinges that I had floating around. The floor boards also hinge forward as they do on the real vehicle. After being treated and weathered they were installed.
The rest of the build was pretty much out of the box.
For the MG 34 I used the second version that came with the 21C MG34 set. The MG recieved the same paint work as the gun I mounted on the King Tiger.
On the kit's shovel I replaced the plastic molded in handle with a turned wooden one. I also replaced the entire paddle with a hand carved wood one.
Both the paddle and the shovel handle has been added to the product line. The shovel handle should work on other DML shovels.
http://eastcoastarmory.com/germanparts.htm
With this little project out of the way I can now move on to the next one.