M29C Weasel, 4 Special Service Brigade, November 1944
The floor is a little bit too long to fit inside the upper hull walls.
The rear end of the floor trimmed so it fits.
Inside of upper hull with main parts installed.
Typical flash for the parts of this kit.
Fitting leaf springs/suspension arms to lower hull: on a piece of glass with a spacer (slightly thicker than 2 mm) underneath, Blu-Tack to brace the lot, and then glueing the springs into their openings
Springs and drive wheels installed
Very large wheels.
Lots of wheels. A Weasel has four bogies with two axles each per side, and each axle has four wheels: 64 tiny roadwheels in all.
One of the four idler wheel halves had not been cast properly
Rebuilt idler wheel complete (on the left) with a better-cast example from the kit.
Glued to 0.25 mm plastic card to strengthen it.
Lining up the suspension bogies: the hull on some Blu-Tack on a piece of glass, then slipping the bogies under the springs, lining then up with a ruler and square-handled sculpting tool. Once all four were lined up, I added superglue to fix them in place.
After the glue was dry, plastic strip and square rod was used to build a frame to strengthen them. This will be hidden behind the side skirts of the M29C, but is not an option for a standard M29.
How the idler wheel mounts and their springs fit, which is not at all clear from the instructions.
And idler wheels in place. The wheels and mounts were reinforced by drilling holes and pinning them with plastic rod.
Tracks bent into shape using a hair dryer and the jib provided in the kit; one has had guide horns added, the other not yet.
Adding one of the tracks to the hull … I flowed superglue between the roadwheels and track after clamping them with self-locking tweezers. The sprocket and idler are not glued yet, as the track there needs adjustment.
Both tracks on now, and adjusted by carefully heating the spots where more bending was needed with a soldering iron.
Lower hull sprayed with black primer, upper hull added and etched coamings around it too.
Floatation cell attached to hull. Add the brass bits first and only then add the cell, so you can be sure there are no gaps.
Front floatation cell with replacement sides because the cast-on ones didn’t fit over the hull sides. These still need to be trimmed to size at the front and faired in.
The splashboard on the bow is a bloody nightmare. It’s almost impossible to bend to the correct shape and when you do finally manage to get it close to that, there are gaps every-bloody-where 🙁
Gap between the splashboard and the floatation cell.
Notice how well the splashboard fits the resin part. Sure, this is probably partly my fault, but if it takes HALF AN HOUR of tinkering with this one stupid part and this is the best I can make it fit, I’ll say this is one of the worst models I’ve built in about 35 years.
The rear floatation cell also doesn’t fit correctly, and has an 0.5 mm gap. It needs to overlap the sides anyway rather than butt up against the rear.
To make the overlap, I glued more 0.25 mm sheet to the sides, to be trimmed to size later, plus some 0.5 mm so the cell can be glued to the hull.
New side plates trimmed to size.
Floatation cell added to hull rear, with sides overlapping.
To make a replacement bow plate, I taped paper to it (in line with the lower bow) and painted over the join between paper and model.
After removing it, the result is a basic template of the shape needed for the underside of the bow plate.
Komentarzy
4 14 September 2021, 19:01
Robert PodkońskiLooks demanding, but I am sure you will overcome all the difficulties... Keep calm and carry on, Jakko! I will follow with pleasure and interest (as I have a Weasel in 72nd scale waiting for its time 😉
3 December 2021, 17:03
Jakko Thanks. This is not a kit I would recommend to anyone, really … It says it's for advanced modellers, and that's not an understatement, but even then I find it awful to build — despite (or perhaps because of) it looking like a good kit before I began.
It's very detailed, but casting quality is not great, fit has suffered as a result of that, the instructions just plain suck and the design seems to have favoured detail very much over ease of construction. But the thing is that that same detail isn't as good as it appears to be: having had a good look at a restored M29C, it's clear that all kinds of details are missing, even though they're of the same sort of size as detail that IS there, for example, and others are wrong.
3 December 2021, 17:17
Album info
An M29C Weasel as used by No. 4 Special Service Brigade in Operation Infatuate II, November 1944.
