Front of the Shilka finished (I think) last night. Quite a few fiddly bits to put together most notably the headlights and IR lights. Headlights – 3 pieces ; front cover – glass – rear cover and IR lights front of unit and rear cover. Now sounds simple enough except (on both items) the front pieces have 4 ‘clasps/clamps’ which need to line up with four very small and shallow indents on the rear cover – they were a right pain to get to go together, seems there is only one and one way only they will clip together, but you can’t see which way till you use a lot of pressure to see if they will clip together, if not rotate front piece by 90 degrees and try again. Obviously with the headlight unit it can only go on one way, but still a (*^&(( to clip into place !
Looking head onto the tank, the left side light housing didn’t fit onto the hull plate very well, left quite a gap – everything else lined up so wasn’t me (this time), need some plastic putty and a sand , as did a small portion of the top of this unit. Why mould the drivers vision ports as separate items, could have been moulded on the shell.
The tow cable and shackles are made from 5 pieces, the tow cable and 4 half’s of the shackles. Now I am glad I looked a step ahead here; as you glue the cable to the hull and attach the shackles, through the tow hooks – it looked like they were simple ‘L’ shaped hooks which looked a bit untidy, so was going to turn them round so you didn’t see the way the cable was glued into the shackle , and this is where looking ahead proved fortuitous, you need to add a second set of half’s to complete each shackle – so why have this in two separate steps – would have made sense to build them in one step. A wipe over the seams with
Tamiya cement filled the little gaps and made two nice units.