Hi all, I used to make armour kits many years ago but have concentrated on aircraft for a long while now, time to take a break!
After enjoying building my 223 Afrika Korp armoured car so much I've put the aircraft building on ice and dived straight into another , a Tamiya/Tasca/Asuka Vc Firefly.
It's a nice kit to build and went together with no major drama, some minor trauma though as I broke a couple of small parts as the plastic seemed hard. As this kit comes with the Tamiya British infantry figures I decided that I would dive in at the deep end and build some with the tank, this will be my first figure building/painting in about 25 years!!!!
I thought that if I was including infantry then I'd better have some tank crew as well so I bought the Miniart British tank crew set, also some Hornet heads for both sets, and some Hornet hands. The detail on the Hornet stuff is great!
I am going to set it all on a small diorama base and have settled on having them all look like they're taking a break during a lull in the fighting.
The driver is sitting on top of his hatch drinking a cup of tea (well they are British!) and talking to a standing infantryman, the cup was made from some old etch brass sprue. I also hollowed out his goggles to put lenses in later.
The squaddie sitting in the loaders hatch is either going to have a sandwich in his hand, or a cigarette, I'll decide which when I get further along.
The commander is talking to the infantry officer who is on the rear deck of the tank pointing at a map.
I had to alter most of the figures to get the posture I wanted, and also used Milliput for the first time in my modelling! The sitting figures had Milliput added to their backsides so as to lose the 'floating' effect that some figures have when just plonked on a model. The commander's torso was cut and tilted forward to make him lean towards the infantry officer, because of this the head now had to be tilted back and a new collar made for his tank suit. The infantry officer was originally a standing figure so he has been chopped the most to make him kneel and point at the map, I ended up gluing copper wire between the sections of body to get the pose I wanted.
Testing the basic positions of the figures
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Hornet heads added to the figures. I wasn’t happy with the loader figure as his posture doesn’t look right, I’ll have to correct this.
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Tea time
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