I have made some small progress on the JSU. Construction phase is almost finished, I have been adding all the small details over the past days. I am still waiting for the barrel, which hopefully should not take that long to arrive.

I encountered one major disappointment with the kit – when I have started assembling external fuel tanks I noticed that the moulding on the tanks is little strange – the straps that I expected to be holding the tanks in place were offset from the supporting arms which are carrying the tanks. This looked weird as I would expect that these should be aligned.

I crawled through net and found out that the straps are actually supposed to be offset, however the whole mechanism of securing these straps to the supporting arms has been omitted by Tamiya, simply because it would be too difficult to mould –  compare the photos here with the pictures of Tamiya kit. Again, this was quite a bit of disappointment, but it reflects Tamiya approach to the design of their models. They are easy to assemble and fit of the parts is perfect, but level of detailed is sacrificed to achieve this…

Inspired by other models I have found on the web, I decided to omit the fuel tanks and simply only add the supporting arms to the model (maybe with the exception of one tank for which I am trying to figure out how to replicate the securing straps in more detail).

I have added some evergreen strips to the rear of the vehicle to replicate parts to which the rear mud guards would have been attached.

I also replicated some cutting marks on the rear of the vehicle and on the side of the large access hatch cover (the vertical one) at the back of the superstructure as I have seen them on the photos of the actual vehicle.

Small handle was added at the rear of the vehicle above the engine access hatches.

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