RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Blimp did a scratch built JS1. Even metal cast the road wheels. All before Tamiya realised JS2

Love the suspension modification. You can see the difference once compared to my KV-1.

Raminator wrote:In addition to being longer, the IS-2 hull is also about 30 centimetres narrower than the KV-1 hull (if memory serves). Would cutting a Heng Long hull longitudinally be doable?

For Junkenburg he is always just reusing the stock Heng Long chassis so I am pretty sure he made his JS-3 mold a little wider either on the inner hull or the outer to compensate for the difference. I did notice it on the JS-2 upper from Tamiya and you can see in the pictures that the tracks sticks out a little on both side to compensate for it, but overall it looks quite reasonable and you have to be a expert on JS-2/3 to notice it.

Too bad Juck is no longer in business, but he was selling just the wheel covers as a conversion kit for me so for sure you can use that, Heng Long KV chassis for a reasonable facsimile of a ISU-122/152.

It's the kind of thing you'd only notice if you were measuring it, I think Herr Juckenburg did a great job creating as many models out of the standard Heng Long stable. Your IS-3 looks great, I love that big frying pan turret.

Got the Heng Long KV1 chassis from Haya/dingdong, it arrived 24 hours after order. It looks slightly used but not a problem given that I'm going to have to chop it in half lengthwise to take out the 15mm excess width and rebuild it. Anyway that's a problem for later as I've still work to do on the Nashorn and kits. Looks like I will be doing JS2 wheel cover kits once I get down to the design work.

Alwyn

Blimmee!
Hats off to you guys for the amount of work you put into building a tank from scratch/modified parts !

Hi Tiggr, yes to me the fun is in taking whatever base you can get and turning it into something else which generally isn't available. Also I cannot and will never afford a Tamiya kit at the prices they sell , so it's a case of getting out the styrene sheet, chopping away with the razor saw, and using the 3d printer to create the bits that aren't readily doable with flat styrene sheet.

All part of the fun and challenge!

Alwyn

Alwyn,

Here is the suspension mod. Similar to the Heng Long T34 suspension mod. Basically you put a square stryene spacer into the suspension travel limiter space to lower the default ride height and reduce the travel distance, see where the black arrow pointed to:
MichaelC.

Thanks Michael. I've been messaging Blimp and I think he's successfully persuaded me to rather look at the KV85 which doesn't require chassis modifications. I looked at the changes he did for the JS3 and I'm prepared to take a shot at cutting a chassis, but the changes he did to get it to the right shape were wholesale dismemberment rather than minor surgery!

Thanks anyway for the info
Alwyn

Well I managed to find a cheap KV1 hull that I can butcher, so maybe the JS1 is back on the list of future builds.

I was bored getting the nashorn kits ready so in a quiet moment I hacked up a JS2 wheel and wheel cover design:


I'm going to print it to see how it turns out.

Alwyn