HERMAN BIX wrote:Oh hell yeah !!...........cant wait for this blunt-force -trauma weapon to be rolled out
And no you can't buy this one Herman...
Herr Dr. Professor wrote:Heavens to Murgatroid! This is remarkable! It looks as if you received the kit with the reduction gear boxes assembled and seal against grease-flinging!
Yup...already greased...verified.
I went for the IS-7 for many reasons...first one is I like Russian armor. Second, I like obscure tanks. Third, I've seen so many cool tanks that I wanted, but waited on and then someone stopped making them. Fourth, I play World of Tanks and the IS-7 was the first Tier 10 tank I bought in the game so it holds kind of a special meaning for me. Lastly, I like supporting the little guy who takes the time to share his talents with the rest of us. Like most people in this hobby, Lukas doesn't do it for the money. I'm sure for what I paid for it, he didn't really make much on it. He did a lot of pre-fitting work which take a lot of time and he included some spare motors and swing arms. With all the hours put into it, I'm sure he actually would lose money if he charged for his own labor. I like that the recoil and elevation is all pre-installed with the servos included. Is the kit perfect...nope, but it is darn good and there isn't a tank on the market I can say is perfect. I will tweak a few things on it to make it meet my needs and add a some details (weld beads, brackets, and flame cuts), but overall it is a great canvas in which to build a masterpiece. It is truly a kit as in the only thing you really have to add is your own control board, speaker, volume control, and LEDs. I may also add is think layer of resin to the bottom of the hull just to seal all the fasteners in so I'll never have to worry about them working loose.
The most time consuming part of the build will be the 3D print line cleanup. Most of the detail parts are resin and quite good. Luckily for me the IS-7 turret is quite roughly cast so hopefully some 3M glazing putty roughly applied and sanded will take care of the turret. I'm sure I will need to glaze the entire deck of the hull also. Most of the detail parts there are added after so they won't get in the way of the sanding of the hull. Took about two hours last night to remove all the parts from the 3D printing support material. That still does leave a decent amount of cleanup work on those parts, but it really wasn't that bad.
I did get all the hubs for the wheels and idlers installed last night. The red arrow shows the hub that connects the two road wheels or idlers into a unit. The hub is sized to take a 5x10x4 bearing which are included. The shafts shown are "knurled" so things are a press fit. I'm considering going down another route so that they are no longer press fit as I will be using this tank on the Texas Armor battlefield which is quite rough. My plan is to replace the provided shaft with an M5 machine screw to be used as a shaft. I will tap threads into the suspension arm and retain the M5 screw with a nut on the inside of the suspension arm. Might be hard to picture, but I've ordered the hardware so I can test it out on one of the included spare suspension arms. In the mean time I'll work on cleaning up the print lines on the hull and turret.
Today I spent my time disassembling the lower hull to add glue between all the sections and retorque all the fasteners using red Loctite since the lower hull will never be disassembled again. Then I cleaned up all the suspension bump stops and installed them. I also added the front lower plate that mates with the pike nose. Also got the two upper halves of the turret permanently joined together.
