He's been mucking about with it and so far he's bent (and broken) the exhaust parts, and the plastic sleeves on the gearbox have split, leading to one track dragging a bit. The exhausts were already scheduled to be pulled, and I'd got the metal Taigen ones from Forgebear last year, but never gotten around to fixing them. The gearbox was replaced with a Taigen unit after picking Dave's brains on the subject first, and that was installed yesterday.
Today I decided to install those exhaust stacks, and was thinking about how best to paint/weather them. I've been using the poorly named track burnishing fluid on my 1:35 static AFV models for a while now, and recently had in some Ultimate burnishing fluid, which you can find here. I'd already used it once on some white metal tracks, so it was already diluted 100% with water, so in the exhausts went after a scrub with a sanding sponge to rough them up a bit, and a wash in isopropyl alcohol to remove any grease. The cast lower section started going black almost immediately, while the aluminium tubes used for the exhausts stayed shiny for a while, but gradually they began blooming in little patches like spots. I took 'em out and rubbed off the residue, and dumped them back in, repeating several times before I was happy with the patina. I rinsed the fluid off with some warm water, and while I was applying some matt black primer to the armoured casing parts, I dusted the ends with a light coat of "soot". This is how they came out - I'm quite pleased with them for a first effort
I overcoated the whole assembly with some automotive clear gloss lacquer to give it some strength, and once that had dried I hit it with some AKAN matt varnish to take the sheen down. Now I just need to glue the parts in place with some epoxy, and we'll call it done apart from the hoses for the smoke generator.
