Final

construction is complete. nothing to say positive about the kit itself unfortunately but eduard's set do come in handy in a number of occasions but i still think it's a waste on such a subpar kit.

i tried to mimic the damage to the mudflaps but dragon's heavy duty plastic is next to impossible to take any shapes with either brute force or a heat source.

i did not use voyager's gun barrel because it doesn't fit the kit at least not without considerable surgery which i am not inclined to waste any time and effort with this poc anymore, it's probably built for the newer tooling variants, not for this one. 

what's left now is the stowage items. i'll see what i can load with and then it's off to primer.

as for the tail lights, kit had one missing so eduard pe came to the rescue. due to my inexperience i could only (barely) fold a good enough looking circular shape on my second attempt so left is plastic right is pe. reason for it being black is due to annealing the pe with a lighter before folding.

the kit does have turret internal to a convincing degree however after all the hatches and what not not much be visible.

also another downside of the kit is that there are no clear parts for the vision blocks. they are molded solid on commander's cupola and simply hollow on the driver's.

as for the extended bustle rack, i am not sure if the marines' had this variant but the entire bustle parts and construction were so terrible i am gonna go with it like this in order to cover it all up later with lbes, tarps and what not with the stowage 😛 

Except highlighting and painting of details on the turret, the paintjob and decals are complete.

paint used was the trusty gunze h313 FS33531 thinned with hardware store lacquer thinner. no tricks in the paint itself but i did use tamiya metallic copper as preshading over panels lines, around the details and also pe parts.

reasons for choosing copper for preshading color:
* paintjar was going foul so i had to use it before losing... 😄

* something i did notice from both gulfs were vehicles painted in this color were beginning to look like they are literally being baked after a while, for lack of a better word so something brown was suitable for a variety of reasons including physical damage.

* used almost black, dk grey heck even metallic blue with this h313 on my earlier models before and those dark colors simply make the sand color go even warmer than this here. i wanted to preserve the tone as much as possible whilst still providing some sort of shade where needed. so i guess gunze mr mahogany primer would be a very logical choice for these types of paintjobs.

* i simply started painting inside the panels and slowly walked the overspray towards the preshaded areas. also used the non slip textures as a natural barrier/mask by aiming the ab almost horizontal to the surface. you could see these effects in the nose section and mud flaps easily as well as any other sloped area on the horizontal. what i did was drybrushing essentially, with an airbrush that is... 😄 hopefully they'll be more visible when i can take shots with a proper camera, not a cell phone.

tried to replicate the effect on the gun barrel per ref shots in the other album however things don't line up simply due to dragon's decals being oversized. the recognition marks on the turret slopes were oversized as well which is a theme of the entire build; nothing fits, decals included. 

next step will be the tracks however if the rest of the kit is an indication i am not optimistic at all for they are link & length plastic tracks....

past the tracks i'll be doing stowage items entirely before moving onto wx.

tarp/id blanket is latex glove cut to shape and painted with testors' fluorescent orange enamel. can't say the paint no because the label had worned eons ago. 

all loaded up.
 

semi gloss on, off to weathering.