With the basic vehicle now having all its details, I turned my attention to the decorations. The CMK kit provides the following parts for the sleigh and reindeer:
The main parts are moulded in a sheet of resin, from which you have to trim the excess (I had already cleaned up the sleigh sides when I originally started building the kit, but not the reindeer). The other bits are three lengths of 2 mm square plastic rod.
Here are the reindeer cleaned up as well:
If you ask me, however, this is a total missed opportunity: these things, and the sleigh sides, could be made very well in etched brass of, say, 0.75 mm thick or so, which would not only make them much easier to clean up but also far less prone to breaking, especially the antlers. I didn’t break any, but I can easily see it happening if you’re not careful. But I suppose resin was cheaper than brass for CMK.
After some trial-fitting to work out where everything should go, I started putting the sleigh together, using a few bits of plastic card as a floor and as spacers at front and rear. I soon discovered that this was very fragile — the plastic separated from the resin sides more than once on just basic handling, despite me trying to glue them on solidly and using some of the square rod to provide extra surface for the glue to hold onto. After the superglue came loose a couple of times, I decided to give up and start from scratch:
I traced the outline of one of the two sleigh parts onto 0.75 mm plastic card so I could cut new sides that can actually be glued. (That thickness isn’t accidental, by the way: since this was built by Americans, I figure they might have used wood one inch thick, and in 1/35 that gives a thickness of 0.7 mm.) I then stuck the two bits of plastic card together with a Tesa sticky hanger thingie I found in a drawer:
This on the basis that the packaging says it can be pulled off without leaving residue, which should be better than using normal double-sided tape. That done, I used a fretsaw to cut both sides in one go to make sure they would be identical:
I first had to make a fretsaw board, as the one I might have once had, has probably long ago gone missing
Removing the Tesa stuff proved harder than expected, because I had put the whole of it between the two parts, when you’re supposed to leave a certain bit sticking out so you can pull on that to make it let go. After some work, though, it otherwise came off as advertised, without leaving any residue.
Anyway, this left me with two good, actually usable parts for the sides:
The real thing was probably made from planks of wood. CMK seems to have thought it was made of boards of material, going by the couple of “panel lines” they put in, but my conclusion from the photo of the real vehicle is that at least one of the lines CMK has taken for a panel line, is the shadow of the vehicle’s radio antenna, so I cut vertical lines with my
Tamiya plastic cutter to represent planks. Since I don’t know how the real thing was actually made, I also put two strips of plastic on the back of each as the planks that hold the whole thing together, then put in a floor and two transverse planks as the spacers:
The sides need some more strip at the top, though, else it’ll still look like the upper and outer planks are held on by USMC-issue spit.