Yesterday I have added dark chips to the Pershing. This was actually preceded by the light overspray of all the decals with heavily thinned Khaki Drab. This step itself contributed a lot to the look of the vehicle – without all these bright and shiny decals it suddenly looked much more aged and dusted. The overspray also reduced the glare from the gloss coat. I feel I will still need to apply few more runs over the decal on top of the turret as well over few areas, that I still find too glossy (can be seen on the photographs below). I did this before the dark chipping so that the contrast between the chips and the paint underneath is not reduced by the blending with Khaki Drab (the goal is actually to achieve completely opposite effect in these two cases).

Dark chips I have applied with drybrushing, using mix of Winsor & Newton Burnt Umber and Black. I might still add some heavier chips using sponge.

I am slowly getting to the look I want to achieve and getting the “depth” in the finish. Part of the effect might get muted with the application of the weathering steps, so I might need to refresh the chips sometime toward the end of the weathering phase.

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Few days ago the decals for the Pershing have arrived and I have spent past 3 evenings playing with them. It was a bit tricky, because the vehicles for which the specific marking options were provided in the set were in most cases a bit unique – either didn’t have the side skirts, or had tarp over the mantlet, etc. There was one marking option which I liked and which fitted my configuration, well, mostly… I have noticed (bit too late, should spend more time on planning next time) that I will have one problem. The actual vehicle had missing some details on the turret  - e.g. spare track link holder on the left front side, some tool holder on the right and .50 cal mount on the turret roof. The vehicle had instead some of the markings at these places, so I had to figure out how to deal with this. At the end I had to cheat just a little bit, so that unless you are an expert on the Korean Pershing markings, I guess you wouldn’t know.

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I apologize for a slower posting pace in the recent weeks, the year’s been quite busy so far and over the last few days I was applying my skills to the remodeling of my house in 1:1 scale…

Anyhow, after giving the Pershing new lease on life, I proceeded to applying further paint coats.

I have again started with the coat of Tamiya Olive Drab, but this was followed by a coat of Khaki Drab. This paint is supposed to be slightly lighter than the Olive Drab, though in my opinion it is actually more brownish than the Olive Drab. I intended to apply just a transparent layer of Khaki Drab, but at the end I just overdone it a little bit, so the model was more toward the brown tone.

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Happy New Year everyone. I know it’s bit too late,  but since this is my first post this year, I hope you won’t mind.

I’ve been absent over the past few days, which in large part was due to my ongoing battle with cold and all its possible symptoms over the past days. All the sneezing and coughing and headaches left me with little appetite for modelling during the evenings, thus the break.

I was still able to make some progress over the Christmas, if you can call it progress anyway…

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Now this paint job was real pain. Frankly it was my mistake, as I haven’t tested the colour to be applied, which could have saved me a lot of disappointment.

Looking for a recipe for the right green colour, I found two build articles of allied vehicles that used Tamiya’s Olive Drab progressively lightened with Tamiya Sky.

Based on this mix, I started airbrushing the base coat. I wanted to apply colour modulation and was thus looking for high contrast between the darker and lighter portions of the model. However I found out that adding too much Sky into the Olive Drab will result in quite unnaturally looking green colour – very cold shade of green, resulting from too much grey in the colour. Without adding the Sky, the Olive Drab was simply too dark. To maintain the colour balance I kept adding other green paint into the mix to keep the right green tone, but this haven’t fixed the problem fully. I was then trying to adjust the colour by using heavier brown filter, but it didn’t work as well .

At the end I had to repaint the model twice, after which I just called it good enough. I have based the colour on the Olive Drab and Sky, but added Yellow green to the highlights. At the end I have airbrushed thin filter of Sky and Yellow Green mix to lighten the colour. The contrast is not as high as I wanted to have, so I might still play with it.

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All the bits and pieces of details are added, so it’s time for some paint.

As the first step I have again tried airbrushing the Vallejo primer. It went on nicely, but it seems to have one drawback – it cannot really be sanded. I use light-coloured primers, becasue they help me spot any details that still need to be fixed – mold seams, sand marks, etc. Well, with Vallejo primer if you try to sand anything, the paint will start to peel off. At the end I was able to address the few issues I have found, but I find that I might still prefer to use the can primer in the future.

After primer, I decided to preshade portions of the model and not to paint it all in Tamiya Black, as I usually do. This was before I knew of all the troubles I will have with the base coat & highlights…

For the primer and preshading I have of coursed masked of the tracks and wheels so as not to spoil their finish.

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The past few evenings I have spent finalizing the details on the Pershing, the usual finish of the construction phase, number of small details to be added, checking and cleaning molding seams, filling gaps – and there’s quite few, though mostly small ones on this model. For the filling of the gaps I use Mr. Surfacer or Tamiya putty mixed with Tamiya super thin cement.It jsut needs a bit of sanding afterwards, but is good in filling small gaps and seams.

As can be seen from the pictures, I have decided to replace all the barrels in the kit. The main gun barrel got replaced with the RB aluminium one, the detail is incomparably better and the price is acceptable. The only tricky part is that the barrel comes without any instructions whatsoever, so you have to figure out how the parts go together. There is not many option however, so it’s not as difficult as it may seem.

The 30 cal machine gun at co-drivers position was replaced with resin one from the Verlinden 30-cal machine gun resin set and again, the detail is much better than the on the plastic one. The Verlinden set is not the top class in today’s standards but is quite decent and gives you full 4 sets of machine guns with 2 barrels for each one of them – I guess they count with some damage during the assembly – quite smart, I must admit…

50 cal barrel was replaced with the one from Voyager’s set. This is really top class, the barrel and the sleeve (or whatever is that part at the root of the barrel called) are very finally made from brass, there is small photoetch sheet provided with replacement parts for sights and rear handles (I haven’t used these).

So now I will have to mask off the running gear and tracks and start priming…

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Having made decision to proceed with the kit’s tracks I moved to the painting phase. First I have applied the primer – this time I have Used Vallejo primer. I haven’t used it before, so I wanted to give it a try (if it’s good for Mig Jimenez, should be good for me too). The paint is relatively thick, so I thinned it a bit using Tamiya acrylic primer, after that it airbrushed quite easily. At the end I still got the airbrush clogged, but this was also due to the paint residue left from the previous paint jobs, so it cannot purely attributed to the Vallejo. But still, I don’t get this normally with Tamiya acrylics.

The primer seemed quite good in terms of adherence and smoothness of finish, so I continued with the acrylics – I airbrushed mix of Tamiya Flat Black and Flat Brown in 1:1 mix, the ratio is not that important, I just wanted dark colour with slightly warmer hue – black would be too dark by itself, Brown brings it more to the palette of tones normally observed in the nature.

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Having added mud and dust to the lower hull I was looking forward to move on to the tracks and adding the side skirts.
I was still not decided what tracks to use, the plastic ones provided with the kit lack the details on the sides, the workable tracks from AFV are just pain to put together.

When I decided to test the fit of the plastic ones, I found out that it is almost impossible to do so without gluing the wheels to the suspension arms, because they are quite loose and keep falling off. Once I have done this, I mounted the tracks just to find out that they are actually too short – by about one and half track. This is another major disappointment and I am currently considering my options. By far he best solution would be to use Cyber Hobby’s T80 DS tracks, which are easy to use and have all the details missing on the kit’s tracks. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a single online store (even ebay doesn’t list anything) that would have them in stock.

At this time I am leaning toward using the kit’s tracks and just hide the gap behind the skirts. Once they mounted, very little will be visible of the upper run of the tracks, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

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