Project 2/2011

Now that I got my other tasks done, I started poking around with this long awaited halftrack. Not that I've got much done, except a bit of the bottom part of the vehicle. Surprisingly I had to start with some kind of a water tank and the driver's compartment. At this point an alarm started ringing in the back of my head: "think what you're doing and how, these things aren't going to be nicely paintable if you build too far too quickly". I took yet another look at the instructions and the pieces and it's a good thing I did.

If I build the complete thing first and only then start pondering on how to paint the insides, it's a bit too late. There'd be either a horrible unfixable mess or a bunch of unpainted patches. The latter is more tolerable but there's always an angle you can look from and see the flat basecoat or plain plastic that wasn't touchable with a paintbrush or the airbrush. And my builds tend to have those accidental bald spots more than I care to admit...

This is why I decided that I'll first assemble just the inner floor with its benches, but I won't attach the driver's console before that's painted as well. If that's for only one reason, it shall be that all the angles would deny any painting post-assembly.

So I cut the roadwheel axises off, cleaned the awful mess left by the moulding process. That way they both are round like axises should be and they fit better in their slots. To the bottom plate I added the drivers' controls, all three weird sticks. This I'll paint before assembling it any further, so I don't need to worry any more. Of course I'll need to cover the insides well when I paint the outside but that won't be a problem of any sort.

But before I go any further with painting, I have to consult the wonderful world of the internet to find out the interior colour and all that. Though I'll hazard a guess and say Dunkelgelb because we're talking about an open-topped Deutsche Afrika Korps halftrack in the North African deserts... what else could it be?