Howdy dudes, i have a pretty good sized update, so far the kit has gone as expected for the most part the fit was good and i knew from the start i would be replacing all the tools and a lot of small details using the spares box and some scratch building so no big suprises except maybe i ended up replacing slightly more of the detail than expected but mostly for the fun of it and this is a good learning kit for this kind of thing, and i didnt want to spend any money on AMs just to keep the project cheap (if i wanted to spend a lot then it would be wiser to just buy the Tasca kit) anyway onwards,,,
following the tub assembly i attached the suspension arms and surrounding details
while the suspension arms were setting over night i worked on the turret, i replaced the barrel with a spare plastic one from the dragon flak kit akso i drilled out the MG hole and added an MG from the spares box, also the molded on weld seams were sanded of and replaced.
next the fenders needed the fronts chopping off then i sanded the undersides to scale them down some
the upper hull followed taking care to keep everything square then the upper and lower hulls were attached there was a sizable gap where the two front plates met so i shimmed it with plastic sheet.
back to the running gear the only problems here were the idler wheels, the mold wasnt lined up correctly so the front half was way off with the rear and need some fixing but it cleaned up ok and the rest was fine
back to the turret there were no vision blocks provided so i added some then the hatches were fitted also the vision slit on the turret side was replaced
next i added the spare track holder on the front most of this was done from scratch also the lights were replaced with spares, i also began adding the other upper hull details
i began on the rear deck with the grills which were missing the straps so they were added then the cable brackets, also the center part of the long rear grill was removed and redone the original was just straight bars across, the exhaust was reworked also
most of the detail on the rear plate was removed and redone from scratch and a spare jack and brackets were added
next i added hinges to the tool box's from the spares box (spares box has taken a serious hit on this one heh)
and that about sums it up for now, still a ways to go but i must say i really am having a good time with this.