Thursday 6 August 2020

Sliced And Diced

I've given into public demand to attempt to make a kit for the Maeofferen Tank Waggon.


OK, well more like a couple of Facebook comments, but I'm a soft touch.

It's a challenging thing to try and reproduce.

My approach with my own model, you'll remember, was to cast a series of hollowed out rings, but I ended up wrapping them in very thin styrene to avoid any hint of the joints.

That would be too complicated for a kit because you would have to align the rings very precisely.

So I wondered instead about whether I could split the tank in half at its widest point?


I chose to go across the middle - rather than top to bottom, because this way I could cast the tank filler and the support brackets more easily.

Again it was a two-stage process,  stating with one relatively thin ring and joining four copies of that together, then using that as a master to create three sections which put together are the correct length.


Because I use open back castings the tank is a solid block of resin this time, instead of being hollow.

There was another stage where I filled and smoothed any obvious ring indents before adding the extra details.


As you can see from the picture at the top the result is quite effective.

It will require the builder to do a little filing and smoothing to fully disguise the join between the two castings but I think most modellers should be able to make a reasonable fist of it.

Onto the chassis, next.

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