I glued the floor into the lower hull and added more parts to the interior:
It’s not complete yet, of course. After that I added the driver’s visors:
Why these are moulded in clear plastic, I have no idea, but I do know it makes the job harder because it’s not that easy to tell if you’ve cleaned them up enough or not. Two parts are still missing, the armoured glass blocks, which I’ll install after painting. Those are the only bits that
do benefit from being in clear plastic, but oddly, Dragon only provided them for the front ports, and not for the sides or the spare blocks you can see in the lower hull. This is a missed opportunity, IMHO.
Also, don’t make the mistake I did and fit the visors’ plate into the upper hull before installing the visors themselves. It’s hard to get them in place like that, and it would probably have been easier when the plate was still loose (as the instructions tell you to do it, BTW).
There are two sets of engine deck hatches, so make sure you use the ones on sprue A, not sprue C. I didn’t pay attention to the letters and just looked for the right shape of part, so I cleaned up the wrong ones and found they wouldn’t fit in the hinges moulded to the upper hull. The other set does
Another small point is the curved bullet splash guard on the roof (part C31). This has a ridge on one side that is supposed to fit into a curved track in the roof plate, but it’s so tight a fit that I cut about half a millimetre off the ends of that ridge and even then it only just wanted to go in. What’s more: the instructions show it upside-down, with the locating ridge upward, in step 12 of the instructions for the basic APC — but not in step 11 for the IR-equipped variant (to add to the confusion, only steps 1 through 4 are common to the three variants; each then gets its own steps 5 through 12 to build the rest of the model).
With the rear doors and a few more parts added, and the upper hull still loose on the lower:
There is another thing to watch out here: the grab rails, D24, have an angled surface so that they sit horizontal against the sloped hull sides. If you’re not careful, you can easily glue them upside-down so they angle down instead — I only found out when adding the second one …