Preliminaries

Look what's come in the mail! Oh my oh my! This is the photo-etched brass bits and also the book. I could not begin construction of the plastic components without knowing how the brass and other things are going to play in. And so here, below, are all the bits, quite enough to begin work. Still to come is the turned metal gun barrel from JB Model. I have the brass etched set, I have the Montex masks, the track set and also a set of very nice sprocket wheels from Fruilmodel, I have the book. Elsewhere I have things like a set of jerrycans by Armorscale and towing cable from Voyager. I'm going to need an after-market MG-34 without buttstock and a pile of other things too but we'll acquire these items all in due course. And we will make our own bits and pieces too. Right now we are just going to focus on the basics and the fundamentals. We will actually be following the order of the instructions in the plastic kit, but we may jump around a bit - providing we are not putting any carts before any horses.

I have this too, an Aztek, somewhere near the middle of the range, never been used. Finally, a decent airbrush, replacing the excellent but very basic Badger I've had since I was about eleven. I do not own a compressor (too poor at the moment) but the cans of propellant will be perfectly adequate for a job like this. But we won't be seeing this in operation for a long time. I completely finish construction before I even think about painting. The plastic box in the picture above is for sub-assemblies. I have never understood those people who fully assemble a model before painting; that seems crazy to me. I hang them all up in the spray booth and paint them separately. Because, for example, how can you paint a roadwheel's tyre accurately if it's already in place? Just how are you supposed to get behind it? Nah, you stick that on a drill or your Dremel and spin it.