The base hull
This time I decided to tell the story of the tank's story in larger and not-predefined sections, maybe a session at a time but in a single post. Otherwise this project would in the worst case progress maybe two, three pieces and a spot of paint a week.
Upper hull and the road wheels
Being the obedient builder I am, I started with the first pre-step by building subassemblies before the first actual building step. That meant that I assembled the exhaust pipes, glued some strenght-providing triangles into the upper rear corners, and build all the [road|idler]wheels and drive sprocets. Those didn't take time, I just sanded the edges clean after detaching from the sprues.
In the first step all I was told to do was to glue the exhaust pipes on, and add a couple of engine intake vents to the sides. The hull part felt a bit flimsy, but I trusted that I could get any possible grimacing kept in check.
What I found a bit baffling was that the lower hull – or as the Germans called it, die Panzerwanne – was built out of four separate pieces. The bottom piece that also included the lower front glacis plate was a bit curved so when I was gluing the sides onto it, I had to do it in stages. The rear end's lower angled part was a bit difficult to attach as its neighbours were grinning so much that there wasn't much contact surface available. That would be fixed with some putty later on, when I had the final shape down.
While the lower hull was curing, I started with the next steps: the driver's hatch and the gun barrel. My biggest concern here was the gun's tip, I didn't want the business end to droop lazily at an angle.
Of course I was dry-fitting the roadwheels onto the lower hull as soon as the pieces were ready for it. They fit in nicely, but I wasn't going to glue them in anytime soon. The upper hull details were easily and nicely installed, so no problems there either at this point. For the record, I didn't even think of leaving the hatch open because there was absolutely nothing inside the tank.
Combining the hull halves
Dry-fitting the upper and lower halves revealed an amount of ugly gaps. With my tools I had no chance of getting it all set in place in one go, so again I did the gluing in stages.
First I glued the front edges together and pressed them tightly together. It had a funny eyepatch-wearing duck-like face. Yarr!
I moved on towards the back of the tank, gluing a lenght of a tank at a time and pressing until the glue had set. The problem here was that these two halves had strangely few contact points between them!
In the lower photos you could see the gaps in the front, even though the glacis plate edge was pretty tightly pressed shut. Maybe my side armour plates had been fractions of a millimeter off in the end, but I obviously didn't know that when I was originally gluing them in place.
My tank's rear end looked like a depressed frog. Closing that gap would require something hefty, maybe I could bridge that opening with a few slices of styrene or even mostly closed it. The hood's hinges would suffer, because I obviously didn't think of removing them in advance.
The 76mm gun in its turret
Assembling the gun was simple. I attempted to build it so that the elevation could be played with later on, but if the axle got glued in one position, that's how life went. There was really little poking these afterwards, anyway.
The turret itself was simple but I was again a bit baffled how weakly its armoured sides and the bottom were connected. Baffled, I tell you. There were no insides here, so the tank was going to be buttoned up.
Thanks to my lighting conditions these photos didn't show how the steel surface had been modeled pretty interestingly. First I thought that I had made a mess on it with glue or something, but no, the surface texture was very peculiar on purpose. That was a fun detail, I was looking forward to seeing it painted up.
All the vents, periscopes, pistol ports and handles got glued in slowly and carefully. Those handles especially were really flimsy, I could've always ignored them by drilling holes into the turret and bent some wire to replace them. But that way I'd lost the funky design that was perfect for a hurrying soldier to get caught by their pocket, belt or some other loop.
Getting the turret-lifting loops to point generally in the same direction had to be the most challenging part here. I was a bit afraid that one or more of them were going to snap at some point, but despite my concerns each survived the process. The photo above also finally showed some of the texture I mentioned earlier.
This finished the turret already. The gun barrel could, in fact, be manipulated by a few degrees.
Tracks
Now I fetched my cheapest and worst flathead screwdriver from the toolbox, lit a candle and started heating up the tooltip above the flame. I connected the first track halves and pressed them tightly together with (round-tipped) tweezers while I pressed the hot screwdriver tip to melt the plastic bit. Then I flipped the track around 180° and repeated it, sealing one of the tracks. And then the same operation was repeated for the other two-part track.
While I was on a roll I then closed the loops and sealed both of the tracks. I had been pondering for a bit if I should first paint them and then seal them, or vice versa. As you could tell by the description, I had decided to paint them fully closed so I wouldn't have to suffer with the issues of sealing painted plastic.
While I was playing with fire I decided to get rid of the antenna creation step as well. The instructions said that I ought to cut a six-centimeter bit off a sprue, heat it, stretch it long and narrow, and then cut off a six-centimeter bit to act as an antenna.
I didn't find it quite as easy, being somewhat inexperienced with this exact process, so my second attempt gave this kind of a maybe 40mm long bit. Large country, large tolerances, they said. I didn't install it yet because I wanted to store the incomplete model in its box, protected from dust as long as possible.
Deck decorations I
Most of the tank's parts were now done as far as I could install them at this point before painting. I also had to install the bits based on what I could any given evening and what time allowed. While something was curing I juggled the project by working on something else meanwhile. In a way that slowed the progress for individual steps but kept me doing something so the overall pace was kept better.
A pair of these boxes were destined for the rear deck. While assembling them I wasn't quite sure if I could glue them in place before installing the tracks or not.
These towcable hooks looked mean enough to impale some dissidents on them. Or perhaps some deer or warthogs for an ad-hoc lunch.
Gap filling
Outside the all-seeying eye of my phone camera I glued on some toolboxes, a saw, something that looked like a horn, and the searchlight as well. Then I decided to work on something much more tedious but important: I glued a series of narrow bits of styrene onto the inside of the rear hull, inserting the bits through the gap. The idea with these was to fill in the massive gap, but also to provide more ground for the soon-to-be-added putty, so that I didn't end up shooting a tubeful of that into the tank and still have a gap to fill.
I didn't have handily available the styrene that was half-thick, so I let it be. The frog/troll ended up looking funnier than before. After having my giggles I applied a bunch of sillily quickly setting putty (Gunze Mr Hobby: Mr White Putty) and left it to dry.
While puttying around I also filled up the gaps in the front, as far as I felt it made sense. While taking a photo of the model upside down I noticed I could've also filled the narrow gaps in the mudguards but I had time if I only remembered the next time.
At worst this was going to take a few cycles. Next I'd sand/file away the dry putty, and if I opened up something again or found out new holes, I'd repeat this but with much less putty and on a smaller surface. And oh boy, was there a lot to do. But that's how I had to putty the T-35 a few years ago.
Sanding the front edge was pretty easy and problemless, the sides were much more bothersome. My four-surfaced nail sander was a bit too bulky, and so were my files.
Then the problem child, the rear end. Here the issue was the amount of crap around the gap. The lower surface was pretty easy, but the upper one not so much with the exhaust pipes and the bolt row. In one session I got it somewhat cleaned up, the next time I'd get on it with the file for somewhat more pinpointed work. I was a bit afraid that the bolt ends were going to disappear and that I had to come up with a replacement.
Deck decorations II
Now I went back to gluing extra piece on the tank. The upper glacis plate got a short length of a track on it, without any sort of a visible attachment method. Maybe there just was something that the track part just lied on freely.
Both the left and right rear corners got a two-link spare track part, not joined together but funnily stacked. This wasn't too clear from the image in the instructions, and I wasn't quite sure based on the model itself how it was actually supposed to work in real life. Most likely somehow wedging them into the edges of the tank or something, so I just glued them as they fell and it was going to be on the viewer's brain to tell the story.
I decided to glue the mystery boxes onto the tank, they were a bit weakly attached but seemed to stay in place. The left one might benefit from a touch of putty, or at least its corner looked a bit grungy.
At this point the only missing engineering tool was the shovel pair and I glued it onto the right side of the tank. Of course the outward facing parts of the shovelholders had visible dimples on them.
I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to fight with the superflimsy handles on the upper edge. Maybe I just had to glue them in, the tank would look better with them than without.
Now my basic T-34 was only missing some metallic hokos from the front and rear end, the tow cables, and a couple of wooden boxes. My biggest issue here was my severly limited hobby time. With the boxes I was also teetering a bit between if I did or didn't want them to just hang around, but I felt I was somehow leaning on doing them. All the little things made the tank more alive.
Deck decorations III
A few days later I got to build again. Not much was left, like I was thinking above.
At some point I had been wondering what was the A15 piece left alone in the sprue because I didn't remember it from the instructions. After a bit of a go-through I found out the corner it was marked in, it was the antenna mount. I sanded both of the attaching surfaces a bit rougher so they'd glue better. Also, those high-strung handles were sickeningly flimsy but they did remain in place.
Both of the towcables were left on the right side of the tank, these were just straight bits with no sag or any planned shape or form. I roughly followed the instructions and tried to get them set in a semi-believable way on the mudguard, even if I expected that in reality they'd behave a bit more cable-like, especially from the toolbox on.
These two wooden boxes weer supposed to be next and kind of on top of each other, on the right side of the tank. That's where the first one went, but I threw the second one on the left side and a bit offset as well. This felt visually nicer to me, it kept the left side from being almost completely empty while the right one would've been like a hoarder's home.
Ah, and I had happily forgotten those four tiny bits by the tow cable hooks. Ignoring this omission I was happily dry-fitting the wheelery. Without their locking bolts they fell immediately off if the model wasn't exactly flat. Well, at least I didn't have to use violence to force them (the wheels) in place.
While I was fooling with the model I also tested out the turret. It looked like a proper T-34 now, and I was thinking how to paint the wheel area the best way. While looking at this photo I got an idea: I'd paint the wheels separately as almost always, but while painting the hull I'd push the lock bits in place so they'd also get a decent and correct paintjob at the same time.
The final flimsy bits
Now I remembered them and installed the four identical tiny pieces on the opposite sides of each of the towcable hooks. I wasn't 100% sure that they went exactly as instructed, but I just couldn't see any better. These, finally, were the last missing pieces of the T-34/76 itself, excluding the antenna but like I have said, it was intentionally left last.
While the hooks were curing I used some time to sand and file the hood a bit more. Had I foreseen this, I would've left the exhaust pipe installation to a much later stage, so they wouldn't have been on the way and I could've just brutally filed the end of the tank clean. But how could I have predicted it?
In any case I couldn't clean the back end perfectly, it was left with some gunk. That I could later on cover with mud or other goo, so a small amount of crap wasn't be a problem nor visible underneath.
Just a while earlier I was thinking of the locking bolts for the road wheels. I detached and cleaned them all, then I wiggled them onto their axles. Maybe before airbrushing I should mask the cylinder parts so gluing them into the roadwheels would be simpler.
So there, the shockingly many weeks were spent on the calendar and the building process for the tank was now complete. If you found the text, or its flow, in this post a bit unusual, I was writing this whenever I had built something and edited my photos. So whenever I was referring to "the last time", or "earlier", I may have been talking about the previous week even if it was just the previous paragraph in the text itself.
The next time I was going to work on the external tool, known as the mine roller. Perhaps that setup was buildable within a decent amount of time, perhaps it was going to cause an indecent amount of swearing. There was only one way to find out.
