1:35 LEP Up Armoured Scimitar CVR(T)

[Boldman]

Thats what I've been attempting to do Ian, hence why I built the jig yesterday, but its the sideways drift of the drill as it goes through the stack of strips that can cause the alignment issues. Its a matter of practice and patience I think...

 

[phalinmegob]

what about heating up a needle or similar and melting a tiny hole through the pieces whilst stacked together and then using that as a pilot for the drill bit.

 

[Boldman]

Thought about that, but I think the solution is to not try to drill too many at once, stick to 4 at a time at the most...

 

[yak face]

Fantastic work andrew! The scratch built one looks perfect, dont worry about a slight bit of misalignment , im sure the real things are all bent and battered . Keep it up mate , were all behind you , cheers tony

 

[Boldman]

Some progress, a decision and some bad news today!

First the progress: left the bar armour for a bit and continued working on the main hull. Got the suspension arms onto the hull and joined the upper and lower pieces of the hull. This required a little bit of trimming on the front towing eyes to get them to fit with the updated front segment. Bit of filler was required around the joints, but no more than you'd expect when fitting resin to plastic. The upper and lower hull joint was tricky and I was glad I had the foresight to add guides to the lower hull. There was an up to 1mm gap along the side of the hull joints, which I filled with Mr Dissolved Putty, which did the trick.

Next I fitted the two outer stowage bins that sit on the front skirt. I decide not to use the headlights that come with the resin since I have the PE set and that has a very nice set of headlamp cover that go with the kit headlamps. You can see them here:

Next was adding the armour panels. Now these are very finely cast in resin, but there is quite a bit of work as you need to open up all the tiny holes in the plate:

As you can see this is quite a delicate and intricate process. Its not helped by varying thicknesses of the resin and you are limited in what you can do as the resin is so thin and there is a raised outer edge so you can't sand it easily. I found a combination f a sewing needs and some thin wire did the trick, although I did have a breakage in one panel.

This is that they look like when attached:

and you can see the breakage. It was at this point I discovered the bad news... it looks like I don't have all the pieces in the resin set from CastOff. I appear to be missing the large side panels that are moulded onto the stowage bins on the back portion of each side of the hull, PLUS one that is in the middle of the left side. I've checked back to the photo at the top of the page and these pieces do not show up there - they would be quite large so quite obvious. So I've written to the guys at CastOff asking if they can send me the missing pieces.

This means I'm stuck at this point of the build, can't progress the hull any further. This means I WILL be returning to the bar armour soon than I thought.

Finally, the decision... a trip to Bovington is in order, so I can see close up a bar-armoured Scimitar. Most importantly I want to see how the bar armour is attached. The photos I have collected don't show it very clearly, so I though the obvious thing to do would be to go and visit one in the flash as it were! Its a 2 hour trip either way (so says Google Maps) so I could easily do it in a day and have plenty of time at the museum to look at other stuff. I haven't visited that place since I was a teenager!

I think I might strike while the iron is hot and go tomorrow... fingers crossed!

 

[CDW]

Good luck with getting the missing bits Andrew.

apart from the hold up, the kits coming together nicely mate.

There's been a few time where i've lost the buzz for a tedius or fiddly stage, Maybe the trip will re-kindle the spirit a bit.

 

[Boldman]

Well that was a fun trip Sunny day, drive through the countryside and a visit to a tank museum at the end of it! I'll post some photos later, still sorting through, but it was a very useful visit. I took my tape measure as well so got some essential measurements. Thank god I did as well because I discovered my plans were wrong. My plans showed different spacings for the vertical bars on different panels, whereas in reality they are constant at 11 inches. Funny thing is, next to the Scimitar is a Warthog and the spacing on its bar armour was 14 inches, so it isn't totally standardized!

Another interesting thing is the Scimitar at Bovington in the Afghan section isn't actually a Scimitar - the top hull looks like a Scorpion - ie it has bolted engine covers rather than the covers with handles that appeared on later Scimitars see here:

It also doesn't have the Up-armoured armour plates, just the bar armour bolted onto the hull. That sort of makes sense as I can imagine that stuff not being cheap and so why waste it on a museum piece! However, it was still a very useful trip as I got so see how the bar armour is attached to the hull so will be able to reproduce that when the time comes. Sadly the wallet took a bit of a pounding as I used up half a tank of petrol and also bought the AFV Club Centurion Mk 5/6 from the museum shop... oh dear I shouldn't have done that...

 

[Ian M]

Hope you had a great day. Funny that you can't even rely on a museum for accuracy. I read some where that on asking one of the staff at Bovington where they get the paint for the tanks, expecting to get a reply along the lines of "from the MoD" he was rather shocked when the chap said they just go to B and Q and get a tin of paint that looks about right. And we go to how much trouble to get the right colour.....!

I look forward to seeing the photos.

Ian M

 

[Boldman]

Not much progress to report I'm afraid, been a bit distracted by other things. However on Monday I did spend the evening drawing up the new plans for the bar armour only to discover right at the end that I'd got the measurement wrong in a fundamental part.

The corner panels are 14" wide on the outside but 11" wide on the inside because the two vertical edges are bevelled at 45% to go around the corners. So I drew the panel as 14" wide, then used this panel as the basis for the other pieces, forgetting to shrink it to 11" wide before I did! So that was an entire evening's work wasted! I started again this morning using the correct 11" wide panels and will complete that this evening when I get home and maybe get some building done!

Sadly I still haven't heard anything from Cast Off about the missing pieces. When I read the reviews of this set there was also mention of some PE along with the resin and I don't appear to have that either maybe they are on holiday or something... just got to keep my fingers crossed and get on with building the bar armour I guess!

Oh I almost forgot, I did upload my photos of the Bovington Scimitar and you can see them in my Gallery here:

Bovington Scimitar

 

[Boldman]

At last, something to report and show! Another session in front of Photoshop drawing up the plans. This time I think I've got them right, and to prove it I printed them out and mocked it up with the paper. First though, here are the scaled plans

and click here for the full size one which should print out at the right scale

I thought it would be a relatively easy thing to do, just draw it up in the full size as I measured it and then scale it down by a factor of 35. Well it didn't quite work out that way, however with some trial and a considerable amount of error, this is what I got:

So now I'm back in the position of being able to fondle some plastic again...

 

[Ian M]

That looks like a good fit.

Have you considered building them in Brass strip and rod? I think the extra stiffness will make it easier to both build and handle.

Ian M

 

[Boldman]

I'll be using brass rod for the vertical rods, but the 0.5 mm plastic strip is robust enough for the outer frames and gives the right look (plus I've now stocked up on the plastic stuff!)

Further news, Terry from CastOff has been in touch and is sending the missing resin bits over! So it will be full steam ahead very soon (fingers crossed!)

 

[CDW]

Excellent news, and a nice job in photoshop mate

 

[Boldman]

This is the result of two evenings work so far:

I'm happy with the two on the left but the one on the right is going in the junk pile! The most difficult thing about these builds is getting the holes aligned. Just a fraction of a mm out and it mucks up the alignment. I'm thinking I'm going to have build a different jog to drill the holes AFTER I've assembled the bars as drilling before seems to produce just too much variation and this rate of progress is only barely deserving the name "progress"!!

 

[CDW]

Shame to waste the "not so good" bits ... can you not use them and make the tank "battle bent & damaged" or would it play on your mind and bug you everytime you looked at it (as it would mine i think)

 

[Boldman]

They get chopped up for other bits and bobs such as...

The Jig is Up!!!

New construction jig after an idea came to me last night...

Instead of drilling all the strips before assembly - assemble the frame and then drill each vertical using the jig!! The frame to the right is the first made this way and it was much easier, however there is a bit of wonkiness in the verticallity (cor I'm good at this lingo!) which I need to try to even out in the next one. Thats 3 of the 4 hull side plates built which is a good thing. The others are a bit smaller, although the turret ones have an extra bar for which I'll need to add another slot in my jig.

 

[Boldman]

Two days on and some more to report. First off, sadly that jig didn't work anything like as well as I expected. It was very diffciult to get the vertical bars truly vertical as can be seen from the two on the right here:

At this point I was on the very of calling it a day and giving up, however I had one more idea on how to drill the bars so the holes lined up better and so created another, smaller - in fact tiny jig that supports the bar pieces and lets me measure the space between two holes and then gives me a good alignment to drill the next hole. This does mean that I've given up on trying to drill whole sequences of holes and switched back to one at a time. IT may take a bit longer but it is more accurate and in the long run faster as I make fewer mistakes and don't have to keep rebuilding pieces .As it stands, the two on the right in the above photo are not fit for anything except the spares/scrap box.

The good news is that since I started using the new jigs, progress has accelerated so that now I have these pieces all done...

The two pieces in lower left and lower right are in the process of having their holes drilled for the brass rod, but its nice to have finally got some good, even looking pieces so it has given me much encouragement to continue and return to the larger pieces.

Now in the meantime I've been checking more photos of the bar armour in situ. Checking the Concord "British Army Battle Group" and the Tankograd Task Force Helmand, has made me realise that the plans I had before are still wrong... the front and rear plates are too narrow and also the wrong configuration. On the hull rear, there are three sets of 2 "column" bar armour, plus single columns either side, to make a total of 8 columns width. The hull front and turret rear has a single 6 column panel flanked by 2 singles. In my earlier drawing I had them all 6 columns wide in total. Thankfully, that doesn't make a difference to me yet as I haven't built that far.

Its off I feel like I make a bit of progress, then get bogged down and stuck for a while, then make another small sprint forward! This time I feel much more positive and am enthused about moving forward!

 

[Centurion3RTR]

Liking what i see here Andrew, can't wait to see more. Keep up the great work mate, you're giving me ideas lol.

Have fun. John

 

[andygh]

This is a really fascinating build Andrew

 

[Boldman]

Well another few days go by and I am very happy to report some good progress, but rather than blather on, let me show you a photo:

Its been a bit of a marathon effort to get these done - each hole for the vertical bars has been measured and drilled individually as it was the only way I could get anything like consistency in the spacing. Even with that, there is some variation, but within acceptable tolerances - well I think they are acceptable These are the successful pieces - there are a few more that got rejected and built again. Even some of the relatively simple single column pieces got ditched and done again as they were either too small or askew.

All that is left is to make the corner pieces. These are a bit tricky as they are 14" wide on the outside but 11" wide on the inside, so I'll have to cut the ends at a 45 degree angle! That will be a job for tomorrow though as all this concentrated delicate work has given me a headache - well the CY and poly cement fumes might have contributed as well

My god I might even get around to doing some painting! Gasp!