I wanted to ease myself back into things, so I thought I'd start with a fairly straightforward project. I had a resin SU-85 kit that I bought from Andreas Brinker before he sadly passed away, and I didn't want it to go to waste. I came up with a few basic goals for the project:
- - Make something along the lines of a stock Heng Long setup to prevent feature creep and stop me getting bogged down; HL electronics, airsoft, elevation, etc.
- Use as much of the original kit as possible so that nothing went to waste; although the design is not super-accurate, the parts are all well made.
- Sell the tank when it was done, so that there would be a definite end point; I still haven't finished my T-34/76 I started more than five years ago!
A few days of butchery reduced the Heng Long upper to this:
And a truly heroic amount of sanding got the resin fighting compartment down to size.
I suspect the kit was designed with the intent that you'd remove basically the entire T-34 glacis and superstructure sides, but I'd learned from a previous Juckenburg kit that that's asking for trouble. I wanted to retain as much of the ABS hull as possible for rigidity. To help with that, I decided to use M3 bolts to pin the resin kit in place in addition to generous amounts of the gel super glue recommended by Herman, Painless and others.
Starting to look like something!
Sitting the combined upper hull over the airsoft gun, you can see the distinctive low silhouette forming:
This is about as far as I got before I became unwell again. Since then, progress has been fairly slow and inconsistent until recently.