M26 Pershing 'Out of the Repair Bay'
Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2013 5:49 pm
After over a year's wait, I finally ordered metal gearboxes, new tracks and sprockets and some detail bits and sat down to put my 9 year old HL Pershing back into running condition. This is still one of my favorite tanks and when I received it, everything worked (which was a rarity in those days for Heng Long) The years took their toll tho' and the nylon gears on the driver side box gave out finally. I cleaned the tank up and it became a Shelf Queen. I thought about opening it up and working on it several times in the interval but had got in my head that it had the RX14 boards and remembered what a horror those were with all of the separate wires that had to be cut and spliced with inline connectors when any major component came out. To my relief, I opened this tank up and found again that it was the old but still reliable RX16 board set. Soldered yes but all in a single plug between hull and deck and only an antenna connector to unscrew. The new gearboxes were a treat to install, no soldering, just engine swaps. New tracks and sprockets and some detail bits (adding a phone handset to the radio box on the rear hull and some extra stowage), fixing the .50 cal and touching up the paint, saw the old girl up and running again. It was very pleasing to start it up and have some fun after all this time. The only remaining issue is that the smoker has gone wonky and only works 50% of the time. Not bad for a Heng Long product with this many years of fun and service given. If the new proportional smokers work with this board, I'll have to drop one of those in eventually.
regards
Painless Wolf
regards
Painless Wolf
