A Belated Christmas Present!

Scramble for your bazookas everybody, there's a new Tiger in town! The Tamiya Tiger is almost done! Reconnaissance reports show these blurry new pictures of this Tiger, probably preparing to storm the front lines in early 2009!

Finishing the Tamiya Universal Carrier Mk.II: Pt VII

The final step to finishing my Universal Carrier was to weather. First, I made a wash out of Burnt Umber paint, (don't ask me what sort of paint/water ratio I used; I just poured a glob of paint into a cup and put some water in with it) and painted over the chassis with it. I let it dry for about 30 seconds and then wiped it off. The results were FANTASTIC!!! I then applied a wash of Light Avocado and painted over the decals to look like worn paint. I highly recommend this to anybody who wants to add extra realism. Also, I applied deep cuts to the paint and plastic and washed over them with Forest Fern, not with silver. After reading magazine articles and seeing multiple tanks up close, I learned that when a tank receives a cut or a chip, it doesn't immediately wear down to bare metal, but reveals a less faded version of the main base coat.

After that I added a coat of mud to the lower part of the vehicle. For this I used Tamiya's Weathering Master, (item 87079), and painted on the mud color. This is a very accurate and cheap way to give your model added realism. For the tracks, I simply applied a red-ish brown wash and put them on. This was fairly simple, but most of the time, you need a second set of hands.

Overall, this was a fantastic kit that I really enjoyed building as an early armour model.

***** 5/5 to Tamiya for such an excellent kit!

Finishing the Tamiya Universal Carrier Mk.II: Pt VI

The most daunting task on the road to finishing my Universal Carrier was markings. Personally, I wanted to model my Carrier after the Universal Carrier of the Calgary Museum of the Regiments, the first one that I saw up close. I VERY CAREFULLY painted in the insignias on the front of the vehicle. This took multiple tries, having to redo the maple leaf on many occaisions, making this a fairly tedious process. Then I placed some decals from the kit, #'s T-252910 and carefully painted a "C" in front of the "T's" in order to make the vehicle Canadian. I then applied a wash of the base color to blend in the decals.

Finishing the Tamiya Universal Carrier Mk.II: Pt V

After finishing the Jerry Cans and other accessories, I wanted to make the "lived in" feel to my model even more obvious so I went foraging through all of the extra parts given for this kit and decided to add one of the extra helmets. The only problem with this was that the inner part was far too small to be accurate a this scale so I took my Dremel tool to the inside and made it far deeper. I then took a piece of paper, cut it into a circle and glued strips of tin foil onto it to make helmet liner and straps. I painted the liner Tan and the outside of the helmet Forest Fern. I then added it into the driving compartment along with some ammo boxes.

Finishing the Tamiya Universal Carrier Mk.II: Pt IV

After completing the Enfield rifles, I then went on to work on the Bren Guns. I painted the three of them with metallic black as a base coat, and then added a normal black wash to bring out the fantastic details on the guns. I then added Burnt Umber to the end and the handles. After that I painted all of the accessories, and when I say all, I mean ALL of the accessories, like backpacks, ammo pouches, Jerry Cans, Ration boxes, everything that a real wartime vehicle should have. The monotonous task didn't take too long when I used an assembly line idea, and painted one side of one Jerry can, Storage Box, or whatever, then cut off another and did the same. When I had finished all of them on one side, the first side would be dry and I could paint the others.

Finishing the Tamiya Universal Carrier Mk.II: Pt III

The kit comes with two Lee Enfeild bolt action rifles, and both are supposed to sit neatly in the rifle rack in the middle of the vehicle, but I decided, since I chose mine to look like an operational vehicle, I decided to add a strap to one and place it in a corner of the Carrier. I took a normal sheet of Tin Foil and cut small, thin strips out of it, and attached it to the places on the rifle where they went on the real gun. I then painted the rifle Burnt Umber and the strap in Tan. The effect was extremely satisfying.

Finishing the Tamiya Universal Carrier Mk.II: Pt II

After finishing painting the wheels, I found all of the parts that require cushions ( seats, back rests, etc.) To do this I started out with a coat of Burnt Umber and and created texture by "poking" ( the only word that I could think of to describe the hand motion...) the brush on the wet paint. I waited for it to dry, and then dry brushed on Roan Red and Country Maple paints. This gave a nice finish to the seats, giving them the perfect look of the real vehicle.

Next I painted the tools on the back of the carrier. The handles received a base coat of Roan Red and the metal parts storm cloud grey. While these were drying I applied a coat of Cashmere and Forest Fern to the fabric parts above. When the tools were dry, I painted the wood Country Maple and the metal a metalic black.