All the metal pieces of the hull fit together extremely well! It was necessary to file the radii off the corners and massage the slots, but that's expected. I spent a few days mulling over how to join the hull, I eventually settled on doing Aluminum brazing. I bought the Bernzomatic brand brazing rods off Amazon. NO flux necessary, and they seemed to provide a good solid joint. I did crack a couple while flexing teh hull afterwards to try and remove a warp, but I don't th ink there's going to be any issue in actual use. I think I would have preferred to have external flux, and if I do this again I think I'll find some. Can't hurt. You do need to be carefull with the heat, as MAPP gas produces enough heat to melt the aluminum, and if you have any of the Tamiya white metal castings anywhere near they'll melt as well. The real trick was figuring out how to hold it all together during the process. I used copper wire, which is what may have produced my warp. Now that I've done it once I think if I do another one i have a better plan.
It does produce nice looking beads...
but it's not immune to operator error. Gotta get the temp high enough, but not too high. Trick is to just keep checking. heat for a bit, rub with the rod... you'll know when it's right.
The torsion bar anchors. I did have to drill the holes out just a hair to clear the swingarm ends.
Nice warp, eh? I don't think it will affect anything, so I'll just leave it...
That's a big assed turret. Looks even bigger now....
Some plastic bits glued together. I still need to source turret rotation/recoil stuff. I have some Impact gearboxes for it, and I'm thinking about going to SGS for a control unit. Although.. I hvae a couple Tamiya DMD 01's that would work, and a DasMikro sound card... might just cobble something together.
The rear bearing on the r/h side needs some dramatic modifications, as there is only one hole to hold it.... All the bearings needed modification, th ough. Due to the side plates being roughly 4x as thick as the Tamiya hull, the swing arms wouldn't go through far enough to allow the bayonet tabs to clear. So, I put them (the bgearings) on the grinder and thinned them down. Wound up being just about 0.15 that needed to be removed. I could have modified the swing arms themselves, but the bearing were a whole lot easier to do.
