After spending the last month working on a floaty-thingy project as a change of pace, it's time to return to the world of armor building. The selected victim is Dragon's 1/35 kit #6253 Tiger I Late Production 3-in-1 with the assorted goodies seen below.
Off and rolling with the usual bane of German tank models, the road wheels! Following the instructions in Steps 1 and 3, the road wheels, sprockets, and idlers were assembled. I opted for the G5 style of wheel appropriate to a standard Late Tiger I as well as the small idler wheels consisting of parts B2-B3 as those are the correct type vs. the larger idler wheel option of G8-G7. I also assembled a short run of 10 of the MK workable links to ensure the sprockets would fit and were spaced properly as well as to test the fit of the paired road wheels.
Step 2 involves the installation of the workable torsion bar suspension, so the first order of business was removing the 16 bars from the sprue and cleaning up their three attachment points.
The bars were installed with glue used only on the square ends of the bars to allow them to remain workable. The road wheels were used to ensure the bars and suspension arms sat at the right height with no floaters and the glue allowed to set up.
Sunday's are the perfect days for working on tracks as I've found that football games make for great background noise and help break up the tedium of track assembly. Today had some good games on and I had the house to myself, so I started in on the MK workables. The set provides a jig for assembling 5 links at a time and the guide horns are separate. Both the MK instructions and the Dragon instructions call for 95 links for the full track run, but that works with the larger idler...the smaller idler doesn't need as many. I initially assembled 90 links and then a test fit revealed that another 3 were needed for 93 total on the left side. The right side may need one more due to the offset of the torsion bar system but I won't be sure until I build that track run next.
Test fit of the first track run with the movable idler and the sprocket held in place with blue tack showed everything playing nice so far.
Next will be finishing up the 2nd track and beginning work on the rest of the lower hull.