Trumpeter/Taigen hybrid T-34/76 (obr. 1942 model)

[HERMAN BIX]

What a riot mate
Sure seems like a near vertical learning curve that we can all glean lessons from.
I'm about a year from one of these myself, so I need to be paying attention.

[Raminator]

"Don't do what Dan did" are words to live by, Herman.

I received the metal headlight and driver's hatch this afternoon, they're crisp pewter(?) castings of the Trumpeter parts so they slot right in. The driver's hatch took a bit of careful cleanup because of all the moving parts, and I took the opportunity to detail it with bits salvaged from the plastic kit. I also reused the original headlight lens, since it's a bit more correctly scaled.

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They've now had a few light coats of primer and are ready for paint. I visited my local hobby shop and loaded up on jars of XF-4 yellow green and XF-74 JGSDF olive drab, so everything should be looking a little more military the next time you see it.

[Raminator]

It took a lot longer to get to this stage than I was planning, but I haven't been well enough to get much done these last few weeks. Little bits and pieces here and there with a decent amount of time to wrap stuff up over the long weekend, and here we are.

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Everything reassembled and painted, with some satin varnish to protect the camouflage basecoat; I'm holding off on weathering for now. We'll be moving out of our apartment while we build a new house (complete with a dedicated purpose-built tanking room!) and I may not be able to get much done in the months before we move in to our new place. I'd rather get back to the SU-152, I figured it's safer to store two mostly-complete tanks than a whole bunch of parts. Less likely to lose anything, at least.

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All the internals installed and functional again:
- Heng Long turret traverse, servo main gun elevation and recoil, servo MG traverse.
- LED main gun, coax MG and hull MG muzzle flashes.
- LED head light and tail light. Piranha battle unit.

[Raminator]

And some photos taken in natural light during the day today:

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There's one thing I'm concerned about before I run it, though. When I had Tamiya Surface Primer on the running gear and ran the tank, the metal tracks shredded the paint off the idlers, sprockets, and inside rims of the roadwheels in nasty ragged flakes. Even with everything redone with etching primer, is it better to sand the paint off the surfaces that are going to contact the tracks? It's not like the paint in those areas would hold up for too long in real life, they'd be polished back to bare metal fairly quickly.

These are the questions that keep me awake at night.

[BarryC]

Awesome looking T-34

Great work!!!!

Barry

[c.rainford73]

Looks like a masterpiece

[PainlessWolf]

Good morning!
Better than Factory Fresh. No pics of real tanks up here now. *chuckles*
regards,
Painless

[Ad Lav]

Looks great! Love a 76mm T34.

[Soeren]

Fantastic job.
The track look nicely weathered as well.

[Estnische]

Nice work Dan. Good to see a T34/76, such a workhorse, historically well-recorded, and yet such a major project to achieve it.