RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Another day, snow outside, warm and cosy in here, coffee, life is good...

Wow!

Looks smart! And menacing!

You are an artist top job!

Great work on another unique build, Rob. I'm really impressed with the design work you've put in to bring it to life. It's nice to see Soviet paper panzers getting some love for a change, too. They had plenty of them!

wibblywobbly wrote:I sometimes feel guilty because instead of cutting up styrene and gluing it together, I am designing parts on a pc screen, loading them on to the printer...and going to bed. I wake up the next morning and all of the hard work is done for me.

I'd argue that the design is the hard part. Cutting a sheet of styrene in and of itself isn't hard, the difficulty is in the measurement and attachment. It's a different application of similar skills to achieve the same end result. We don't have these hobbies for competition anyway, it's more about our own enjoyment than being awarded points for some objective measure of "effort" (whatever that means).

It's a labour of love either way for me. Working with styrene is way quicker, I have built many tanks using it. The CAD design is a whole new ball game, for anyone who does it for a living and can create shapes standing on their head it would be a walk in the park to design a tank. Us mere mortals have to sit there for hours typing in code, adjusting numbers and figuring out how to do things until we get the result that we want. Lots of design revision, error correction, changing things so that the part will print nicely etc. The big bonus is that there is no cloud of styrene dust that coats everything in the room.

This one was built 100% from styrene, apart from the engine vents.

I think the beauty of 3D printing is once you have the design you could print as many as you want, imagine the dust & cuts if you had to make a load out of styrene
Lovely job Wibs
Cheers
Wayne


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After numerous attempts, prints and designs, I decided that the front mudguards on the prototype would never have been fitted to a production model. The whole design of this TD is angular, so my guess is that the big rounded ones on the museum example would have been changed.

I spent today doing many different ones, around four I think, and they each took 90 minutes to print!. I ended up with these which I think suit the rest of the hull a bit better. Not historically accurate, but hey, this one will actually roll around a battlefield.

Now need to do the lower hull plates front and rear, a few brackets, and a recoil/traverse mount for the servo's.

Managed to complete the upper hull, and plates to cover the lower hull front and rear. I have installed a lip at the front so that I only need one or two screws at the back to remove the upper to charge the battery etc.

I only realised yesterday that none of the pics of the prototype in the museum show any exhaust pipes. However, there are no pics that I can find of the rear of the lower hull? I am going to take a wild guess that the exhausts are mounted on the rear plate, and make up something suitably Russian looking to go on there. I may mount it on magnets and hide the on/off switch behind it, which will be a bonus.

The citadel should have a raised area of armour around it, if I can cut some thin styrene to the correct (and very awkward) shapes I'll do that later, along with the rain guard that goes on top of the mantlet.

I have added a few pics to give an idea of the size.

I realise the first image is from WOT but the second one seems to confirm it. There is a small plate sticking out at the back of the side fuel tanks. It look like the exhaust sits under this.