Tow truck 1: cockpit

Top side

Having the underside gluings dried I flipped the chassis on its feet. I guessed that was going to turn in to a proper vehicle, even if it looked a bit strange at this point.

I started on the cockpit assembly pretty quickly. The seats, the stick and the steering wheel got glued onto the floor plate and I stopped briefly to ponder if it was a good moment to stop for an interior paintjob. This vehicle was devoid of details, especially compared to the Grad, so I decided that if I didn't glue the roof on yet, I'd get this done well enough as it was.

So I glued the wall frame onto the floor piece and the face plate onto the frame itself. Interestingly both of these vehicles were going to be pretty well ventilated, as I didn't see a single piece of transparent plastic here for windows.

I glued the cured cockpit tub to the front of the chassis. The previous photo showed, how the front had a peculiar, large rectangular hole in it, the practical point of which wasn't evident to me because the cockpit module covered it completely anyway.

After a moment of glue-curing I attached the necessary pieces around the doors. The piece in the front corners had the hinge details, and where the extra lights were installed at this stage. The wing mirrors were not done now for whatever reason. As usual, I dry-fitted the roof piece now that I got the reinforced windscreen wipers on.

Without any glasses it looked a bit strange, but what could one do? These pics revealed a couple of badly cleaned up sprue remains, I worked on them afterwards.

Tow truck 1: power transfer

The underbelly of the first vehicle

As I had the tyre sets all built, I then built the suspension / differential housing balls (could you tell how amazingly deep my automotive understanding was?), so that they too would be ready to be installed whenever needed. In addition to only single tyres that were going to be installed into the front axles, the leaf-suspension steup was slightly longer than what the rear axles were going to get. Without thinking much, if at all, about painting, I glued the double tyres into the rear axles.

To the frontmost ball a short driveshaft was installed to connect it to the torque converter (got the name from the instructions). At this point I spent a fleeting moment if I should've painted these subassemblies separately, but as the whole damn thing was going to be 99% olive green, I just plodded on.

As usual, I dry-fitted the front axle and -wheels to their places, but for some reason at this point I recognized the pain point of painting. That wasn't going to help much, for the rear wheels were already there, making the process a bit more bothersome.

The frame got a couple of boxes attached to it, the larger was the fuel tank. The smaller box was unspecified, so from my point of view it could've been used to carry the jack, for example. "Toolbox" was pretty much as much details as I got.

Next thing was the rear drive setup, the complex that was made out of the leaf springs, the ball of differentials and whatnot, and the tyres on axles. This set was also connected to the torque converter by a driveshaft. I guessed this was pretty much how heavier wheeled equipment had the habit of working, I just trusted the instructions as being more knowledgeable about these things than myself.

Weathering the metallics

A metallic weathering session

I guess I had complained clearly enough that the metallic pieces could not stay steel-coloured. They wouldn't have been any better in aluminium, like the instructions suggested, if you asked me. Luckily I hadn't been silly and painted them all with chrome, that'd looked even stranger.

The first photo of the series showed a number of scratches on the rear end of the carriage. Those came from dry-fitting the lifting fork earlier. The piece went on nicely, but getting it out almost required some loud swearing.

Oily Steel

My weathering process started with a heavy-handed drybrushing of oily steel (VMC 70865 Oily Steel). The steel basecoat was so slippery that this paint didn't really stick on with a gentle touch, so I had to take this more seriously than I originally intended. Especially the loader's slide for the grenades was going to need some more work later on.

The cannon's barrel's middle segment looked somewhat better after it got oiled, even though the effect was still a bit light for my liking. This was a good direction.

The lids of these who knows what hydraulic liquid containers and the strange rails also ended up looking somewhat more normal after a bit of oilying, but still the problem was that the change was quite small. Still, the worst edge of the bling had been dulled, but it clearly needed to be toned down even further.

Gunmetal Grey

As the steely engine covering plates of the Flanker had gotten much more better-looking with Gunmetal, I took that paint out next. The rear-carriage's metallics got nicely darker again, but still I was thinking if a brown or black wash would be needed in the end.

The barrel's look definitely improved now, its surface wasn't an even, steely-shiny fresh piece of metallic plumbing, but a bit more worn and something that had seen some life; repeatedly greased up, cleaned up, then regreased for storing, and cleaned up again for a firing that was never going to happen. Again, a really good direction for this part of the cannon.

Guessing that the same cycle of being treated with the same products was what happened to these front-carriage's bits. Mere gunmetaling didn't bring enough "lived in" feeling to this area, in my opinion. Especially the snowman-shaped lidset was practically crying for some disgusting weathering liquids on it (perhaps the VWE series' oil stains and such would be at home here).

Of course before any sort of washes and weathering effects I'd need to fix a couple of pieces, blast a couple of shades of brown to filter the whole construct to look a bit more like it had been in the deserts of Nevada for the Operation Upshot-Knothole.

Forks and tyres

Transport mode-ing

I began assembling the lifting forks as the cannon was pretty much completed, build-wise. The fork for the rear of the carriage I had already prepainted once, so that fixing it would be hopefully easier. This lifting fork was a simple being, the massive block just needed a free-floating truck attachment thingie and a couple of rods with loops to lock the setup into the rear end of the gun's carriage.

Of course I dry-fitted this setup onto the carriage, as you could tell by the images. Those loops were supposed to catch on to the hooks in the bottom rear end of the carriage. That was not the case right now, based on a quick try and an honest attempt to steer far away from any violence.

After the fork was done I proceeded along the route and assembled a pile of tyres. The amount required was borderline ridiculous for two silly trucs, but I assumed this was how heavy (wheeled) vehicles worked. So far this was the second time I was working on such a vehicle, so bear with me.

The build order of the instructions felt a bit weird because it wanted me to build the tyres just when they were needed, but I felt it quicker (and less annoying) to just get the cursed things out of the way straight away. So I went on my merry way and did the needed single tyres, then the double ones. Now they'd be ready to be put in place when I needed them.

As I had not peeked that much further to the future steps when I was painting the last time, I hadn't thought of painting the other lifting fork as well. This second fork was much longer than the other one, but didn't make use of a axle pieces at this point.

Cannon assembly

At last I was in a stage where I could glue the cradle of the atomic cannon to its carriage. Getting the left axle mounted properly was surprisingly tight, now I'd had some use for a vise or something more modern.

They may not be too clearly visible in these photos, but I also attached the foldable step things that I had painted in their sprues earlier. Somehow I had gotten the impression that they were going to be turnable open/closed, but no. I quickly tried as an example to check if one of the large ones could be easily set in to the firing mode, but that didn't work (and I was concerned about breaking the tiny hooks), so I set the full sextet into the firing transport mode.

Before anything else got done on the cannon itself I was going to have to attack the metallics. The boom of the shell lifter could also benefit from a bit of detailing in the shape of a rope, but I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to depart from the OOB route.

Steely details

Brushing the little bits

At this point I started rechecking the instructions for what actually were the bits to be painted metallic after I had already blasted the whole thing green. Off the top of my head I remembered that the cylinders of those two cans (but definitely not the lids) in the carriage's front were to be painted, in addition to a couple of other small pieces. But of course I was wrong.

The hydraulic cylinders had the lids on the painting list, as were the weird tracks on both sides of them, and a set of rails and stoppers framing the ramming device. The handles to control the setup's elevation were painted as instructed, as were the handwheels for the elevation for the gun barrel itself. Though unlike what the Revell folks wanted I only painted the outer rim and left the spokes green, as I expected to be painting them some other colour rather soon. As you could see below, the setup was already looking a bit dazzly for a weapon of war and I didn't even follow the suggestion of painting the gun cradle's axles metallic. Just to see how it worked I only painted the innermost part and even that seemed a bit weird.

Maybe the barrel itself was somehow tolerable, I still had to iterate through the little rods with the steel paint. I just felt that this was a bit too weird this way.

Round 2

After a good night's sleep. I felt that it was way too blingy and more like a beginner's first Warhamer 40,000 tank or something, all it lacked were a few dozen skulls and shit. Still, I did an image search and quite a few finished models looked just like the instructions wished, but especially the hand wheels looked like they had been lifted off of a clown car. The parts that were to remain steely I was going to drybrush with either of my duller/darker metallics, so that they wouldn't stand out quite that much, as if the device was fresh out of the factory.

So I repainted the handwheels, the inner ring of the gun axles and a few sloppily painted overflows. It was noticeably better this way. On the handwheels painting over the metallic was a bit less covering than perfect, but maybe it'd work as paint being worn, just done the opposite way than usual.

The rammer's through-like bit I did paint metallic, with the "it'll be dirty later" looming in the horizon. As the carriage was now it was better than before, but still pretty striking and not in the best of ways.

At this point I removed the final piece of the gun's rear end and painted the remaining pieces: the tail end of the barrel and the rods with steel, the rest green just in case that it could be seen from a strange angle later on. In the natural lights and bare eyes the model's pieces didn't look quite as weird as seen through the digital camera.

A steel barrel

Sun mask

I spent a decent time masking the cannon's barrel, to be sure. Protecting the tipmost part was a simple setup of two overlapping pieces of tape, but on the stem side that didn't fly. As the end of the paintable area was where the barrel went inside the housing setup that was going to remain green, I had to cover the mouth of the other one first. I just applied a bunch of tangential pieces that anded up looking like a strange sun. That was enough to protect the greenery from overblasts.

Painting!

The instructions kept telling that every metallic piece had to be painted as aluminium, but I wasn't going to even consider such nonsense, I loaded the airbrush with steel (VMA 71065 Steel) and blasted away. As was to be expected, the contrast between a bright metal and the dull, boring green was almost eye-searing.

With the tapes removed and on its own it maybe looked a tiny bit less awful, but still damn weird. My next step was going to be painting the rest of the metallics with a paintbrush, and I didn't expect the situation to become any prettier. More bling on a flat green bulky thing? Not a promising mental image.

A drab world of olives

First splashes of colour

Getting to one of the painting stages I was pretty eager to see how the atom cannon behaved when it looked more like its real self instead of an untextured 3d model. The paint I used was Olive Drab (VMA 71016) as instructed, even though any of the german camo greens would've also worked just fine. On my first painting session the time was, as always, somewhat limited, so I tried to get a decent enough coverage that showed if the whole thing made any sense. While I had to hold on to something, there were noticeable unpainted patches on both ends of the carriage.

Second round

On my next painting session I covered up what I had skipped the previous evening and fixed the shadows left by the first painting round. Slowly the cannon started looking like a proper thing in the universe, even though painting the whole damn thing in one boring colour felt just like that: awfully boring.

The carriage

The biggest problems of the carriage's painting were more or less hidden, inside the frame itself. With some good luck no one, including the unforgiving eye of the camera, would ever notice anything, but the risk existed. A few details were still waiting to be painted, but those I didn't even dream of airbrushing at this point anymore.

Maybe a bit of weathering would make this a bit more interesting. Also the assembly of the cannon would bring some more excitement to the build.

Barrels of fun

I took (I thought) a great deal of care of painting the cannon's barrel, its cradle and their neighbours, while leaving the middle part of the barrel untouched, for it was going to be painted with a steel-type paint. For a while I was unable to make me mind if I should or should not disassemble the rear part of the gun and paint it in pieces (and multiple sessions). Being a lazy character I didn't do that, but maybe undo some parts for the next cycle.

Fixing the priming

There we go!

You could immediately tell what was the best tool for this sort of work. During a couple of evenings I redid the priming with the freshly treated airbrush on the components I had already built, and the results were on a completely different level. Of course the brushed-on primer layers could be seen through, but perhaps it wasn't that sort of a crime on a cannon. Those beasts were going to get crummy in any case, living in the nature and all.

The carriage I redid all around, inside and outside. The cannon's barrel with its cradle and related equipment got painted too, this time I had set the moving pieces into a "ready to fire" mode. The middle section of the barrel I left as it was, as my thought pattern was that it was going to get painted steely in any case, but I really couldn't figure out later, what did that have to do with anything in the first place...

It came back home!

Badger badger badger...

It didn't take many days from the dropoff until I got the sms informing me that the servicing was done. Within a couple of days I took a quick early evening drive to fetch it and ask some stupid questions about the process. My airbrush had indeed been dirty, but I had also at some point managed to install the tip into a wrong place, which had definitely not helped with the issues. Luckily I had not broken a thing, so I gained some scratches on the device and a "you silly fool" moment for myself. The time & materiel costs were less than 50€ and the amount of time and effort, not to mention madness, they saved were worth much more. All in all, a great deal from my viewpoint.

Now I needed to get some time to return to the priming, in addition to everything else. If I had enough time for everything, that is.