Finished: Project VII/17

T-35 "APTEP"

Specification

The T-35 itself was of model 1938 and in nature it weighed 45 tonnes. It was 9.72 meters long, 3.43 meters high and its armour plates were 10-30 mm thick, which couldn't have been worth much even back in the day. With its V12 engine this ugly beast went tops 30 km/h for a maximum distance of 150km, I'm boldly assuming that was only under optimal conditions. This beast required a crew of 11. For its 76.2mm main gun there was a set of 96 grenades, for its 45mm guns a total of 220 grenades and the 7.62mm LMGs had 10 080 rounds (about two thousand per piece of hardware).

Engineeriness

I had mumbled about the idea and the background of the tank before I actually started on it, so I'll spare you from that bit of repetition. Instead, let me present you some numbers!

Over the duration of the project I published 23 session posts, each containing 45 minutes of doings on average. A huge amount of those minutes, as I have mumbled before, was spent on context switching, also known as getting started and winding down, in addition to some random interruptions by the project assistants. So: 23 * 45min = 1035min / 60min = 17,25h which turns into... phew... Over two full workdays without lunch or coffee breaks.

Despite the monotonic tank colour and the total lack of camouflage the monster ate about a dozen different types of paint and paintlike substances and three types of glue. I meant to use two out of the decal set (the rest were mostly plain white stripes) but as the second red star went into a roll, I threw them both away. Zero percent success there.

I guess I could've laid out some wiring / cables for the lamps, but I went OOB instead. The star-shape on top of the main turret could've been painted somehow, but as I didn't find* a single useful reference photo of it, I let it be. That's the way I handle stress :p

*) not that I spent ages searching, I gave up easily as the tank was obscure and not too many were produced

About the kit itself

All in all Zvezda's T-35 was an interesting kit to build. Somehow the bits demanded a huge amount of cleaning up, which then caused the assemblage to be slower than something like a Tamiya or a Dragon kit.

The bits fit all nicely, there were no serious fitting issues, only the deck of the tank caused some problems, but I fear that as it was the only one, the fault was mine alone. Generally speaking the build was straightforward, the most obscure and stability-wise the most dubious one was the bottom of the main turret, that consisted of odd strips and to my great surprise worked out just fine. The other turrets would've wanted a clamp-like piece to keep them in, but to make my life easier I just ignored those.

Imagery

Following my own silly traditions I have left the usual "all around the model" photos also now as the thing's officially done. During the project I've taken so many dry-fitting pics because the tank's so amusing / odd / weird, that the excitement of seeing it this way may have worn off for the reader.

A meta moment on one Thursday afternoon

When I started taking the photos above my main and first problem was, that I didn't know where to take these damn things. New (to us) home's problems, say. The hardcover Jeff Smith's "Bone" One Volume Edition inspired me to take it up for rereading. Jumping off the topic, I hereby officially give it the readability recommendation of the 'mumblings!

Session XXIII

The final touch for prettiness

I went through the metallic bits of the engineering equipment with a black wash (Citadel's Nuln Oil). After that I finally glued the glass plates on the front lights. All this took about twice as long as it needed, as my younger project assistant decided to come to assist me.

Stupid as I am, I tried to apply the red star decals to the skirt armor plates, but the second one was torn useless (it also went all boiled spaghetti and folded itself under its own self and I got pretty well pissed off). At least I got the first, the perfectly aligned one, off and to the garbage. Damnit.

I. Loathe. Decals.

Session XXII

Weathering on a warm May afternoon

I begun weathering the APTEP tank by drybrushing the wearable bits of the caterpillar tracks with VMA Steel, and from there I progressed to the various other wearable parts of the tank and its turrets. Among those were the turret's loops, the inner surfaces of the tow cable loops, the hinges and so on. The most delicate touches I reserved for the countless bolts that were protruding from everywhere. I cannot claim I did anything visible to the naked eye on each and every single one of them, but generally they should stand out tad more.

The numerous PanzerGranate-inviting straight vertical plates I wanted to decorate with Rainmarks Vallejo's Environment series. I drew some more or less random downward aiming streaks, of various lenghts. It may very well be that I got carried out a bit, but I'd mark that down on the column of "hey, I want to play with this new thing".

From the same series I also utilized the Mud and Grass goo, that I mostly applied on the bogies, the front and back belly armour, and a bit on the idler wheel neighbourhoods. I tried to keep myself in check and not overuse the stuff on this model. Fearing the ruinage of a perfectly good (or a bad one) paintbrush I used a q-tip instead. In hindsight that may have been a bit too brutish an applicator, but as this wasn't going to be a fine detail, I believe it was most ok.

As you may notice from the final photo, I finally remembered to cut the cable reel's thread. All that remained for the next session only the headlight glasses and washing the engineering equipment. It's not much and I assume that's it then, unless I've forgotten something again.

Session XXI

Slogans

I abused translit.ru - that my former colleague Sergei used often for his writings - and wrote the characters down on a post-it note for copying. The main problem ended up being "which five work-related things am I going to use here, anyway?". In the end I did choose those pretty easily, hopefully not regretting my final choice later on, which'd cause annyoing repainting.

АРТЕР
ИМС
АРЦ
БЛУЕПРИНТ
ЯФ

Department for Agitation and Propaganda

With the slogan-like texts ready I grabbed my tiniest paintbrush and the white VMA paint and started pondering which word would go into which turret. I thought that I'd decorate just the turrets, nothing else, so they'd be on the main turret, the gun turrets and the LMG ones. As the tank was for obvious reasons going with the project name "Arter", that was going to go to the main turret. The rest of the words/turrets combos kinda made sense to me. Of course someone who knows more about things (numbers, actually) could raise a bit of a hell about what's important and what isn't, but with my software developer's goggles this is how they got distributed :)

ARTER

Onto the left side of the main turret I painted Arter, the name of my previous workplace that they changed to last spring. The whole APTEP-silliness started with a stylized name-logo where the R's looked more like P's. And when you remembered, that the cyrillic 'R' is 'P', we got plenty of bad humour out of that.

Painting the chars on the turret was slightly bothersome, thanks to the weird antenna monstrosity. I guess it ended up being readable.

IMS

The frontmost gun turret got the word/name IMS, as I worked a bit longer on that one (maybe a year), when I worked there. My original idea was to paint the words on one side only, but I ended up doing most of them on both sides. With the short words, because the fit in a reasonable manner.

BLUEPRINT

Blueprint, html5-editor, process editor, a beloved child has many names. The main reason for me to use it here is that it was and still is quite a central tool in both products. That word was damn long and my handwriting wasn't that small, it didn't fit tolerably on that tiny turret-bucket twice.

QF

QF or Qualitas Fennica didn't have any direct connection to my own everyday work, but as it was pretty important company-wise, I thought it'd make sense in this theme.

ARC

Architect, ARC, whatever people called it in speech and writing, was the other service I worked on for a bunch of years. That's why it got the place on the other gun turret, but ended up in the rear end of the tank.

All together now, comrades

Now I'm humbly apologizing the helpdesk gang, but I didn't come up with a way to mix helldesk in to this circus. I did spend an amount of time doing helpdesking too, so it'd fit in as well.

Session XX

The brushing stage

Now I had reached the paintbrush stage. Or at least I had never felt confident enough to do all this with an airbrush without wasting half a kilo of masking tape and an eyewatering amount of time. So: handcrafting called me.

The gun barrels were the first ones to be touched up, as some bits of them hadn't gotten a good coverage after all, you could see few patches of the primer showing through. Pah. After that I painted each LMG end poking through with plain black.

Tooling

After the turrets I turned my sights towards the engineer's equipment and such. First I painted the insides of the lamp cupolas on the front, the iron bars (on the right side, next to the shovels) and the towcables with steel (VMA 71065 Steel). The rest of the metal parts, the shovels, the sawblade, both pickaxes and those somethings with oily steel (VMC 70865 Oily Steel). As I still remembered I touched up the LMG barrels a bit with the same paint to bring out the shapes a bit.

To complete the first session with the tools I painted the wood bits with light brown (VMA 71136 IJA Earth Brown). Ages ago I read an article where someone made his wooden parts look realistic by drawing the lines of the wood with a pencil. I kinda didn't think I'd ever be up for that. My apologies if I have rambled about this before, I know it may not be the first time. Nor the last.

Tracking, tracking, tracking...

I pondered unusually much on how to approach the caterpillar tracks this time. After the airbrushings they were still dark, but obviously much greener than what I needed. So I slapped on a layer of black with the intention of keeping that as the base, but didn't worry too much. After letting the black paint dry for a while I overpainted all of that with my brownish mix (VMA 71040 Burnt Umber + VGC 72011 Gory Red, this time I didn't add any orange).

These tracks are still waiting for their brown-red layer

Session XIX

Finishing up the base paintjob

I took some time to fix up the pieces, which kind of rounded out the second 45-min session so that despite what the posts claim, there was one more session but this made the time calculation easier. Anyway, I finished up the painting of the turrets and then I touched up some bits that had been shadowed.

Then I loaded up my airbrush with a bit of black paint and I sprayed that with a wide arc, from a decent distance, towards the rear deck, especially the engine's fan cover and the exhaust bits. Of course that made these areas stand out way too much, so I applied a fresh layer of Russian Green on top of all this to tone it down a bit. It ended up way better this way.

Session XVIII

Starting up

I began the painting by airbrushing the tracks and their immediate surroundings black (VMA 71057 Black) and the bottom of the hull and the side armour plates green (VMA 71017 Russian Green 4BO). Despite the small amount of stuff I did it took a surprisingly long time to get it all done. Maybe I was a bit rusty since it'd been ages since my last airbrushings.

The next evening I continued with the tank's deck and I also painted the first halves of the turrets (somehow I had forgotten them completely the previous evening). When the whole tank was decently greenified I took some light brown paint (VMA 71136 IJA Earth Brown) and sprayed it a bit on the deck, much more on the bottom areas, especially concentrating on the roadwheelery. I tried to get as believeable a light layer of crap I could manage.

The turrets looked pretty comical now that they were painted only from the bottom. I obviously wasn't going to leave them like that, so it was fine that they stood out like this in the wip pics.

Session XVII

A priming process in two acts

First

As usual, I blasted the primer on the model in two subsessions. I chose my starting side so that I'd have the most coverage. To achieve that I thought that the bottom part of the tank would be good, and as for the turrets I decided to prime the tops first. Naturally I forgot the cable wheel totally and that was the bit I intended to start with.

Second

When I was done I left the bits to dry overnight and to my great surprise continued my priming the next evening. This time I started with the cable wheel, then finished up coating the turrets and finally the tank itself with the most weird bits and shapes. The side armour plates on the tank weren't up to my made-up requirements, so I gave them another layer of primer.

To wrap this session up I present a top-down image - and to break up the monotony of my photography a bit. That gave a pretty wintery feeling. Now it'll be nice to get back to the basic green painting.

Session XVI

Straightening up

A part of the armoured plates were grinning uglily, so I wanted to take care of them before proceeding. I didn't try anything more complicated than applying glue and squeezing the bits tightly together. Most of the bits got fixed, but I wasn't left with perfection, anyway.

A coin for scale, again

PuTTY

The rest of the gaps I was going to fill up with putty. But what did I find when I finally sat down and started unscrewing the cap? I immediately got a flashback (to last or even the previous year, maybe) when I touched the cap: I had only left it just a bit closed, so that it wouldn't dry up while I was applying the goo on something.

Apparently what I had used had been enough and I hadn't realized that it was still openish. All that remained was stuck inside the tube and utterly useless. Sigh.

So I went by the LHS on my way from work the next day and bought a new tube. I didn't care about the brand, so I picked up the first one I saw. The one I had earlier was Tamiya's, this was something called Mr. White Putty. It was a bit runnier than the thickish old one was, based on one trial run.

Sanding it all down

Erring on the side of caution I allowed the stuff to dry overnight and sanded the excesses off the next evening, resorting to a file in the more annoying corners. The left front of the tank looked a bit off, but that was caused by the extra gluing, not by putty that didn't feel like obeying abrasive behaviour.

I'd be priming this beast the next time(s)! On the seventeeth round, which'd be a questionable record even for me.