M48 - Painting

A lot more work has been done on the M48. Last time I stopped at that hard to figure out point where you pause construction and start painting. For the scissor bridge, this point has already been passed and some spots are very hard to get paint on.

There are a lot of workable hinges and joints. If you attach everything before painting, you risk running paint into the moving parts and restricting or even totally blocking it's mobility.

Everything is primed in black, my favourite primer. Nothing wrong with the grey and white, except the black just "feels" easier.
One day later, everything is covered in Vallejo "Dark olive drab" and construction can continue.

One annoying thing is painting the black rubber on all those road wheels. These had to be painted by hand. The alternative - masking - would take even longer.

Below is the result. Some post-shading on the larger panels breaks up monochromaticity (my new word for this week). Initial post-shading was with too light a shade of the base colour, so I went over it again with a mist of the base colour itself. Results are satisfactory.

Below is a shot of the wheels and tracks installed. The "tension idler" (front wheel, not touching the ground, used to give the tracks the right tension) is not glued in place, to keep the tracks easily removable for optional painting/weathering later. The return rollers are snap-fit, the rest of the road-wheels is glued, but they remain movable thanks to some fine Revell engineering. (Remember, this kit is from 1959)

The decals are nice and respond well to setting solution. I use MicroScale's Micro Set (the red bottle).

Below are two final shots of the result so far. All I need is more varnish to protect the decals and attach the tracks. The mechanism to deploy the bridge is fully working. By hand, I mean. No hydraulics are provided in the kit.

The last picture clearly shows the spot I missed during painting (top-middle of the bridge). I airbrushed it from a lot of angles, but I did it all in one go, so there's not so many options to hold a still wet piece to shoot paint at it from all sides. I will correct this in a last finishing session.