Landships II

After discussing about the roof gratings at some lenght in this thread I think it's fair to show what's I've done on the basically good Emhar kit parts so far.

The upper "turret"

After carefully cleaning up each piece, I saw that they were made with quite precise measurements, and that each fits the place in the roof of the hull nicely. The difficulty here was in assembling five small pieces without interlocking features in its edges as a rectangular box. I started by sticking them into approximate position using blu-tac. The I adjusted slowly the assembly to the proper geometry using a glass pane as a base and a flat metal square as a guide for right angles, all while trying to keep all side and the roof edges aligned and with the best possible fit. As I discovered very soon, handling this small box without any positive grasping feature was quite difficult, so I added a small "handle" to the roof in the form of a tiny ball of blu-tac. Once I was satisfied with the assembly, I glued all edges from the inside using a bead of thin plastic cement, capillarity made the adhesive run into the small crevices. Once it was left to dry over the glass pane and square overnight, I took the sticky blobs from inside the box and reinforced each joint with gel superglue.

Now the turret on its place:

Tracks

As recomended in several build reviews, I cut off the teeth of the idler wheel. As both track pieces were identical I just choose one from each side and the opposite from the other. It's not too easy to remove the detail without marring the nearby details. And as you may notice from this photo, there's a slight line of flash around all the mold join lines, which should be cleaned up.

The sprue attachment point of the tracks to the parts tree are very diffcult to clean up, but fortunately enough, they are mostly hidden from view once the model will be assembled and standing on its tracks.

A thing to note is that the motor gear doesn't have any axle and it "floats" in the track without any phisical connection to the body underside detail. Something's odd here, perhaps the floor housing must be wider, or there should be small portions of the axle ends protruding to it up to the gear centres.

Roof gratings

Acording to the discussion, the gratings shouldn't allow seeng inside the hull. I cut pieces of styrene sheet to close them from underneath, but the shapes of the inner recesses were somewhat irregular and my small additions still left some opened up areas at the edges (I exagerated the effect here, for dramatic purposes).

I tried something different now, carving a small "lip" inside, around each grating, to use slightly larger styrene pieces that can close the gratings completely.

The hull front

Here is the gun mounting that needs the shape of the cannon opening changed. It's a small detail, but I dare say it's a significant one in the character of the model.

I removed the inner tabs that "locked" the hull exterior to the floor of the tank, as this made impossible to assemble the hull without gluing the side to the floor beforehand. Here's also the inner view of the gun mount. It might be slightly poseable if not glued to the support, but I think it's not too useful for modelling purposes.