JGSDF Light Armored Vehicle Part I

The Luchs went so well, I immediately started on another armored car. This time I upped the ante by buying a Tamiya model. As far as I'm concerned, Tamiya is the Rolls-Royce of plastic kits. The parts are incredibly detailed with an excellent fit, and they usually include some metal or photo-etch details. I picked up the 1/35 scale model of the JGSDF Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) that Japan deployed to Iraq -- it reminds me of my old Suzuki Samurai, but armored and with a machine gun on top.

The model comes with a metal chassis and some kind of hollow rubber or vinyl tires that look perfect. Of course that meant I had to pick up some Tamiya super glue -- plastic glue doesn't work on metal. I also picked up some primer for the chassis, but it turns out Tamiya took care of that for me.

With the LAV, I had to do a bunch of painting before assembly, mostly the interior and parts of the under carriage that I never would have been able to paint after assembly. But I'll tell that tale later.

The assembly was easy and fun. All the pieces fit perfectly, and there were no seams or gaps to fill. Even super gluing the plastic parts to the metal chassis went well. I did run into a problem with the windows, though.

The pros in the magazines recommend Elmer's white glue to assemble clear parts because plastic cement causes them to "mist" up. Now, I'm a show-me kinda guy, and I don't remember ever seeing that happen when I was a kid building models, so I used plastic cement to glue them in place -- and it caused the clear plastic to "mist" around the window frame. Aiyaaah! But it's alright. You don't really notice anymore it because... well, I'll get to that later, too.

While the 1/35 scale LAV is quite a bit larger than the 1/72 scale Luchs, I still ran into a problem with some of the small detail parts. One in particular: The driver's side lift ring on the hood. The piece was so small, I decided to use the X-Acto knife to remove it from the sprue. As soon as I made the cut, it vanished.

So what do I do now? I moped about it for a couple days, hoping it would turn up. Then the cleaning lady came, and I figured it was gone for good -- just like the Luchs antenna. I toyed with the idea of leaving it off, but then I remembered my new modeling motto: Just fix it.

What would the pros in the magazines do? Fashion a new one, of course. And that's what I did. I took the clippers and cut the rough shape out of a sprue number tab, then eyeballed the size and shape of its mate on the passenger side, and whittled me a new lift ring. I needed a pin vise drill to drill out some holes for the stowage rack on the LAV anyhow, so I bought one and used it to drill the hole in the lift ring also. It ended up looking pretty damned good.

This was a whole new level of model building for me. Scratch building, the pros call it. I was pretty damned full of myself for pulling it off (yes, I'm pathetic -- shut up). At that point, I was ready to tackle anything. Ah, sweet hubris. I bet this is how President Bush felt about Iraq -- until it all turned to crap...

links: technorati