1:35 LEP Up Armoured Scimitar CVR(T)

[Centurion3RTR]

I've got to give them fruil tracks a try someday, they do look the part.

Have fun, John

[Guest]

Yesterday was spent working on the hull and roadwheels. The resin requires you to cut away the existing skirt from the lower hull:

I added a couple of strips of plasticard to give the joint with the resin upper hull a more positive location. The roadwheels were assembled but I didn't bother taking a photo and I began my research into the colour scheme to use (see another thread on the forum). Then today, several packages arrived, including the 1.5mm x 0.25mm Evergreen strip and the 0.5mm diam brass rod. This means I can have another go at the bar armour!

So I started cutting the strip and found that it is very difficult to handle since its so small. I realised that with the strips so narrow, getting the holes drilled in the right place on each piece might be a bit tricky. I also realised from experimentation that getting all the strips to be EXACTLY the same length was tricky and if they aren't all the same length, aligning and fixing the two side bars is very hard! So I decided to build myself a jig to hold all the strips for a particular piece of bar armour together and then build drilling templates for each piece as the spacing seems to vary!

So here it is:

What you see here is 16 strips which comprise all the horizontal bars for the sides of the turret, the same pieces I tried to make using the brass earlier. They are all stacked and I was able to use a sharp knife to trim the ends to make sure they are all the same length. Above it is the template for the drilling, made from two more strips that have been glues together to be a bit more robust. This then gets laid down above the stack and the drill applied. I've found that its not a good idea to try to do more than 8 at a time because the drill can go a bit astray the further down the stack it travels.

I'm going to have to get another pack of evergreen strips - this one came with 10 strips, each about 14" long, but in my experiments I've already used up 4 of them! It takes one complete strip to furnish the 8 horizontal bars in this pice and some of the other segments are longer and have more bars!

Well at least it isn't horrendously expensive stuff!

[Guest]

Stopped off at Modelzone at lunchtime and picked up some 0.5mm thick strip to make the outer frames which seems to do the trick - makes the frame quite sturdy and is barely noticable. As a result, here is the first complete bar armour panel:

Sadly some for the bars are a bit wonkey, but this is my first attempt with this new technique. Had some issues getting the holes drilled in the right places as well. That will require some considerable car, as well as aligning the bars correctly in the first place. After this I beleive I can do it, but it will take time and patience... oh boy!

[Guest]

andrew, a little suggestion which may or may not help, if you drill the outer holes the right size and all the intermediate holes a fraction bigger than the bar there would be a small amount of movement on the rails and they should stay straight as long as you glue the ends in the right spot. i know what i mean but i am not sure in type if that makes sense.

[Ian M]

Cut the strips for the panel and clamp them together and drill the holes in one go through the lot.

Or

drill a strip with the holes in one long strip. Cut to approx length and then insert the bars. Trim the length and the add the frame....?

Ian M

[Guest]

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...

[Guest]

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.

[Guest]

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

[Guest]

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!

[Guest]

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.

[Guest]

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

[Guest]

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

[Guest]

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...