Borked Code

Photo-etch parts

Although the Trumpeter kit does come with some photo-etch parts for grilles and fenders, there are a couple of extra 3rd-party PE kits to go with it that add an even more dramatic level of detail.

For this kit, I’m using the Voyager Model PE kit, although I won’t be using everything from it.  A lot of the parts from the Voyager set are interior bits, like hatch hinges, tools that are kept inside the tank, and in particular an infrared telescope that is meant to be mounted on the side of an opened hatch.  My intention with this kit is to have it in buttoned-down mode hiding in trees and foliage, so a lot of the bits won’t be needed for that.

Notice the comparison items here to give you some sense of scale. Click this image to see the full size version.

A note about photo-etch:  some bits are REALLY f***ing small.  Look in this photograph – you’ll see some parts here are less than 1mm wide – some are basically 1.0 * 0.5 mm in size.  If you have big hands like mine, this is going to pose a major challenge, particularly since getting brass PE to stick to plastic requires super-glue (cyanoacrylate).  I’ve included some common items like a pen and a container of glue as well as a small cm ruler to give you some comparison.

That’s not to say you should just forego PE if you have big hands – on the contrary, I think it adds a great deal to a kit and can really take the beauty of a finished model “to the next level” (I cringe at writing that phrase).  Just be prepared to have a lot of patience with it.  Also, if you’re going to be working with it, have a clean mat clear of debris beneath your parts and if at all possible, a very dark drop-cloth beneath your seat.  A rather powerful flashlight will also come in handy (because you WILL drop a much-needed part the size of a grain of sand on the floor, and the better contrast you can build up, the easier it will be to find).

In the orange box is the chisel – I use a 1mm head, and the yellow-grip pliers are smooth-faced to hold parts while I file the rough edges away.

In addition, a smooth-face pair of pliers (most pliers have serrated or rough faces to give better traction, you don’t want that) are really useful for holding PE parts without marring them.  A tiny-headed model chisel is also recommended for removing parts from the center of PE sheets.

When you remove the parts, generally you want to press down on the part with one finger while you apply the chisel to the connector, and make a habit out of this.  Some parts it won’t matter, they’ll be big, but if you’re in the habit, then you won’t have tiny parts go flying away into who-knows-where when you separate their last connection to the main sheet.  When you do apply the chisel, make sure you are going after the connector at the point where it contacts the sheet.  If you hit it right at the join to the part, you’re likely to warp the part and give yourself a headache trying to smooth the part out before applying.  Instead, leave a bit of the connector on the part, and when you have it free, grip the part in your smooth-face pliers with the connector exposed completely and the part itself just barely extending out.  Then use a good file with quick, light strokes to file away the connector in a lateral direction (across the length of the part, not against its thin side – you don’t want to end up folding or crumpling the part with your filing).

Make sure to think ahead and decide in advance which items you want to do and which you don’t – and cross out the ones you don’t on the instructions. As you complete items, check them off so you know where to go back to when you return.

As you pick-and-choose which parts will look best on your model, cross them off the instruction sheet that comes with your PE kit so you’ll know what you’ve done and what you aren’t going to do.  I erred in this way and ended up building the infrared telescope from the Voyager kit – ooops.  Although once I was done I was pretty proud with having finished it, there went two hours which I could have spent doing other bits on the kit.

Twelve parts, two hours, and a small part of what’s left of my sanity, gone away forever.

Ready for grab-handles and schürzen mounts, all the plastic has been shaved and sanded away.

Some parts will require to to carve off sections of the plastic molding on the original kit parts – for example, grab-handles and mounts for side armor (schürzen) in the PE kit look much nicer than the little nubs on the side of the hull of the original kit.  (Big note on this one – this is where PE kits end up adding a crap-ton of extra time in building a kit – there are fourteen grab-handles and twelve schürzen mounts, each one is a multi-part assembly.  If you just want to build a kit and paint it up nice and be done, this is the kind of part you probably want to skip.)  In order to mount them nicely, the existing molding will need to be removed.  I use a standard Xacto or other razor knife to shave off bits at a time, always gently (except when I forget and apply too much force).

Notice the tiny little brass bits on the bottom – those had to be CA-glued to the resin. I had to include this pic, to justify my actually building this part.

When you are shaving these bits off, as I just said – do it gently.  If possible, make sure that the entire blade is parallel with the hull, so the hull serves as a guide to get a clean removal.  Once you’re down to just a few little rises (you’ll feel them still), you can reverse the blade and drag it backwards over the remainder with some pressure, and this can remove those last stubborn bits that keep evading you.  Finally, use a 600-grit sandpaper to smooth things down.  You may also find that the removal process has left faint outlines of where the old elements were – this is a good thing, because that’s what will guide you on where to place the new PE parts!.

Because it’s hard to build models when half your hand dangles like a zombie.

Hey, did I mention you should go gently?  There’s two reasons for this, and they both have accidents as their point.  If you find yourself exerting any kind of significant force (and by “significant” I mean more than you would consider needed for cutting through a skinny little piece of plastic), something is about to happen.  That something is either the blade will slip free, or the part you are cutting will sever – in which case, you have a blade with a good bit of force behind it suddenly moving somewhere you didn’t expect.  Depending on the fulcrum of your grip, that somewhere is either going to be into the model, or into your off-hand.  Either way it’s going to make a mess of your model, either by putting a big gouge into it (repairable with putty, I hope), or a big blood-spatter onto it (generally washable, but gross).  You’ll also end up pissing yourself off, pissing off those who care about you, and if you’re really unlucky, you’ll entertain some ER doctor when you have to explain why (s)he is having to sew your thumb back on.

Okay, see you later, once I’ve done some more.

Back again – sorry for the delay in posting, but our living room lamp blew out and I haven’t had an evening with sufficient light to do any work.

Tonight I’m going to be talking a bit about the suspension, some pre-painting on the wheels, and more about the roof options.

The Suspension

On the Trumpeter model, the suspension units for the E25 are pretty simple – they are three-piece elements (two sides and an end-cap) that end up looking deceptively similar.  As well, there are extra pieces on the sprues to make more suspension units – but only enough endcaps for the exact number – which initially threw me off as I ended up with too many for one side and not enough for the other, but once I discovered my error it was quick to remedy.  Fortunately I figured out what was up before the endcap’s glue set, so I was able to remove it and apply it to a new unit.

The assembled sides, minus endcap

End-on view, showing axle extension

The first step of the kit instructions will have you building a total of twelve suspension units, and the second step will have you plugging them into the lower hull.  The instructions don’t, however, explain which ones go to which side (not really necessary, as they really only fit one way).  Just lay them out once assembled so that you have your six for left and six for right grouped properly.  It was also helpful for me to put them in order – each suspension unit has either a long or short axle extension, as the wheels will be interleaved with one another.  The one shown above is a long axle unit, with no endcap.  Once on the hull, they are placed in order long, short, long, short, long.

Once you plug them into the hull (and the pic below also shows some extra parts installed), it’ll look like this:

Note the placement of the axle extensions – long-short-long-short-long

Wheels

I haven’t attached the wheels yet, probably will save them for late in the build, but I did pre-paint them on their sprue to go with the ambush camouflage I’ll be using.  Here’s how I went through it:

First, black primer.  Second, German armor yellow as a base color (I had a spray can of Flames of War “war paint” in the right color available, otherwise I’d have air-brushed them with middlestone or something similar.  Here’s the sprue with the base color:

German Armor Yellow, Done.

Next step, I chose to keep two of the wheels on each side in the base color, so I masked two wheels and their hubcaps with standard masking tape.  After that, I decided I’d do two wheels on each side in green, so I hit the next four wheels and caps with German Green.

Green Wheels, Done.

Lastly, I masked those off and hit the remaining two wheels and caps with a dark German Armor brown (pretty close to a chocolate brown).

Brown, Done.

I set the whole sprue aside, I’ll deal with it and the tracks later.

Roof Options

I was pretty sure early on that I’d be building a model with the machine-gun turret installed, but I went ahead and built both roofs (leaving off the unique parts for the one I was going to keep and use) just for completeness.  Conveniently, all the parts which are separate for the two options are kept on different sprues.

Each pair of options is found on a separate sprue, so if you know which you’re going to be using, you can set the other aside.

For the non-turreted version, I discovered that it was pretty easy for me to make the mistake of assuming that everything was going to be sealed up – not so fast!  The main hatch is actually a double-hatch, and the smaller of the two is described in an open position in the instructions (for the record, if you want to build the kit in buttoned-down mode, the parts fit perfectly).

Roof Option 1 – with binos attached. Note the messy rim around the hatches – I was too quick to act and glued them in buttoned-down mode before realizing the binos extended up through the smaller hatch.

This stuff is in step 9 of the instructions, and it’s the first part.  There are two pics of the roof, the left one is of the top and the right is of the bottom.  One tricky piece to assemble is the binoculars – the binocs are cast as being folded straight up, and they slot into a retaining bracket which will get glued up against the underside of the roof.

The Binoculars attached to their mounting bracket

The mounting bracket for the binos glues to the underside of the roof, right next to the hatch.

Note the positioning of the binos relative to the hatches.

Once attached this way, it can be difficult to find a way to place the piece somewhere that won’t deform the binos, but the corner of the box happens to be a perfect spot.

Just set it aside and let it dry a while.

Unlike option 1, option 2 is a bit more straightforward.  The MG turret fits clean (though I did trim the retaining flanges a little bit to make it swivel a bit more easily), and all the bits are pretty easy.  I’ll push a few pics of it up on my next post.  I’m also starting in on some resin and photo-etch extras, so I’ll cover a couple of those on the next post too.

Hi all –

Quick post today – last night I started the build on the E25 Tank Destroyer, as produced by Trumpeter.  I’ll post a quick update later tonight, but last night I did up the suspension units and some small lower-hull details.  I’ll take a photo and post that later too.

Meanwhile, here’s the original unboxing vid I did when I first bought the kit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR_xQHQ5BSg