LVT-4 Water Buffalo

[Glaurung]

Moving on with this thing.

I don't have many pictures of all the stuff I plan to place in the cargo hold, but here's some .30 cal ammo boxes to show:




However, there's a lot of stuff to paint and weather separately. Guns obviously, but gun mounts, .30 and .50 ammo boxes, jerrycans, hatches and drive sprockets as well:




Tracks have been primered and painted as well, but they look too silvery to me right now, so I'll have a light coat of dark metallic paint on them before weathering.




And the vehicle itself has a base coat on. There were a lot of doubt of what shade of Olive Drab to use, but I finally went with the Mig acrylics and it seems pretty good to me.










'til next time,
Kristjan

[Glaurung]

Hi again.

So I have the decals and final coat of satin clear added. I used Bison Decals 35187 sheet. Decals for my vehicle were bit oversized compared to the photo, but since I really didn't have any other option I decided to use these anyway.








Most of the separate stuff has been painted as well.




Kristjan

[Glaurung]

Hi again,

Washes and oils are added. I tried to make it a bit more worn and rusty than I usually do. These vehicles were made of mild steel and were used in sea water and moist environment. The photo of the real thing show a pretty faded vehicle as well.










And all the other little bits to this model. Of course I won't use all the oil cans here - it would look like a moving gas station - but I made few more to choose from later.










Kristjan

[Glaurung]

Tracks are now finally on. But these turned to be real nightmare to handle. After I applied oils and pigments, the tracks, they became very fragile and literally started to fall apart even to the slightest touch. After many moments of despair and thoughts of considering Friuls instead of this crap, I somehow finally managed to glue these on. Then I added superglue everywhere I could to reinforce the tracks as much as possible.

There's not much left any more. Cargo area needs some more work and then final touches.










Thank's for watching,
Kristjan

[Glaurung]

And It's finally finished.

USMC LVT-4, Okinawa, april 1945.



























And some closeups:


















Thanks for watching, Kristjan

[mech]

Hi Kristjan

I'm impressed, excellent job. Are you thinking of adding figures and making a diorama for it. I really like that you made the ramp workable and the removable hatch to see all the interior work.

Cheers,

Ralph

My scratch builds web page https://s1301.photobucket.com/user/s...ibrary/?page=1

[Glaurung]

Thank you, Ralph.

I,m sorry to say that no figures or diorama are planned for this model and I really didn't concerned either from the very beginning. One reason for no diorama is that I planned to display it side by side with my LWS model that has no diorama either. It is somewhat interesting to see these vehicles together - two different approaches for a pretty similar purpose - german one is a total failure, as the US one is a success.


Cheers,
Kristjan

[Fledermaus]

Krisjan excellent work

Abdin

[Gopher]

Great work!

[MZsolt]

Kristjan, that is an amazing finish (again)! Glad to see that finally you won and not the crispy-cracky tracks
All along the build I admired the subtle details what you were doing - really great job, congratulations!
I have a question though. What color did you use for the gunmetal? I struggle with that always and yours seem so realistic.
Many thanks!
cheers,
Zsolt