Piranha PWI-GR

[Jakko]

You'll love the model I intend to start after this one, then

 

[Rimmer]

You'll love the model I intend to start after this one, then

oooh - intriguing!

 

[Jakko]

For the headlights, I took a look at the Canadian Piranha, the AVGP. I had some lights left from a Hobby Boss Leopard 2, and scratchbuilt the mounting from some plastic card and punched discs:



They're not 100% accurate, but they look good enough, if you ask me. Maybe I'll add more detail later, we'll see. The lights should actually "float" above the armour, but because I made the backing plate from 0.25 mm plastic card, I doubt they would survive for very long if I had replicated that, so I glued them to the armour instead.

On the back, I added the hinges for the hatches:



I wanted to make the hinges from plastic strip at first, but eventually went for sawing a slot in a piece of 2 mm square rod, using a small hacksaw because the blade of those is much wider than of modelling saws. I then filed the top to be half-round and sawed off the finished hinge. After glueing them in place, all it took was adding a piece of rod between them and some strip cut at an angle for the part of the hinge attached to the hatch.

The filler cap is just some scrap of plastic that happened to be 3.5 mm diameter with a 3 mm disc on top, and some more strip etc. for the hinge and lock. The pieces of tube on the rear plate are for the lights, but those aren't in them yet.

 

[Richard55]

Wow nice Scratchbuilding Jakko.Really nicely done.

 

[Jakko]

Thanks. I'm still looking for a good way to make a slightly conical ventilator to go between the hatches, though I did find a solution to making the circular firing port covers — it's just that I have to wait until Wednesday for it to be delivered

 

[Jakko]

At the back, I added the typical antenna tuning box used by Dutch Army vehicle radios from the 1970s on:



It still needs the antenna added on top, but I'll only add that after painting. The dimensions come from the parts in the AFV Club YPR kit, and I had actually made two, but one came out crooked so I decided to only put an antenna on this side instead of on both.

At the front, I completed the hull hatches:



The commander's hatch is really just a copy of the Grizzly's hatch based on Trumpeter's instructions

 

[JOHN R]

Great detail as expected , your knowledge of vehicles is brilliant .

 

[Jakko]

I'm partly making this up as I go along All there was IRL was one vehicle converted for trials in 1981, so what I'm doing here is pretty much just looking at other Piranha variants (mainly the Canadian AVGP) and extrapolating what the Dutch Army might have wanted from it. Currently, what's occupying me there is the location of the smoke grenade launchers — there were none on the trials vehicle, but an in-service version would certainly have had those. Trouble is, there is no really good place to put them where they wouldn't be in the way. I suspect they will probably end up on the sides of the nose, for want of a better location.