Jakko
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2024
- Messages
- 612
On another forum, we're doing a group build of old Tamiya kits — it must have been released in 1984 at the latest, and you're supposed to build it old-school rather than sticking every possible modern accessory on it. As shown elsewhere on this forum, I picked the Panzerkampfwagen II kit that's older than I am 
I built it long ago, when I was maybe 15 or so at a guess, and chose it now because (as also mentioned elsewhere on this forum) it was the cheapest Tamiya tank kit I could find at Exito when I was looking to buy Panther tracks there (they do have cheaper Tamiya military kits still, but I didn't want to build an antitank gun or only figures).
So, it arrived today around noon. I started building it a few hours later, and within about half an hour, had finished steps 1 and 2 of the instructions:
I then took a bit of a break and continued on with step 3:
Followed by step 4:
Because this is an ancient Tamiya kit, it has large openings on the underside of the upper hull, which I filled with some plastic card cut to size:
Then just bring it all together:
Missing here are the spare wheel on the front and the exhaust on the back, because I want to leave them off until after painting. The wheels and tracks are loose, partly because they're held on by the good old poly caps, and partly because I'll remove them for painting.
Now, the group build is partly also encouraging us to put the vehicle into an old-school diorama, so I began byplagiarising drawing the parts for one on my computer. After printing out the drawings, I glued that for the base to some plywood and those for the building to styrofoam:
After the glue had dried, I cut the building parts out with a sharp hobby knife. This is much easier than you probably think, and far less messy, too. The trick is to use a knife sharp enough to cut through the little styrofoam balls instead of pushing them out of the material, and to go slowly but steadily. I first cut along the outer lines, and then made the broken walls by cutting at an angle from the inner lines you can see in the photo. I still need to cut out the baseplate, which I'll do with an electric saw, probably tomorrow.
Then it just remained to glue the parts together, using some cut-down cocktail sticks as spikes to secure them better:
And a rough impression of what the diorama will look like with the tank:
A few of the figures from the kit will also be added, of course
I built it long ago, when I was maybe 15 or so at a guess, and chose it now because (as also mentioned elsewhere on this forum) it was the cheapest Tamiya tank kit I could find at Exito when I was looking to buy Panther tracks there (they do have cheaper Tamiya military kits still, but I didn't want to build an antitank gun or only figures).So, it arrived today around noon. I started building it a few hours later, and within about half an hour, had finished steps 1 and 2 of the instructions:
I then took a bit of a break and continued on with step 3:
Followed by step 4:
Because this is an ancient Tamiya kit, it has large openings on the underside of the upper hull, which I filled with some plastic card cut to size:
Then just bring it all together:
Missing here are the spare wheel on the front and the exhaust on the back, because I want to leave them off until after painting. The wheels and tracks are loose, partly because they're held on by the good old poly caps, and partly because I'll remove them for painting.
Now, the group build is partly also encouraging us to put the vehicle into an old-school diorama, so I began by
After the glue had dried, I cut the building parts out with a sharp hobby knife. This is much easier than you probably think, and far less messy, too. The trick is to use a knife sharp enough to cut through the little styrofoam balls instead of pushing them out of the material, and to go slowly but steadily. I first cut along the outer lines, and then made the broken walls by cutting at an angle from the inner lines you can see in the photo. I still need to cut out the baseplate, which I'll do with an electric saw, probably tomorrow.
Then it just remained to glue the parts together, using some cut-down cocktail sticks as spikes to secure them better:
And a rough impression of what the diorama will look like with the tank:
A few of the figures from the kit will also be added, of course
