French Light Tank R35

Ron Garcia
Super fast and easy build as all Tamiya models typically are. A few tricky spots, though.

The pioneer tool bundle is mounted on a backing that makes painting on the other side of the handles difficult. The painting guide show the camouflage through the handles, but I opted for a dark wash instead to obscure the supposed "see through" backing. Same with the muffler. It has to be installed while building due to making the painting line up, but makes for painting it later tricky.

The link and length tracks were great, but I would have appreciated at least four more links. Mine fit EXACTLY. I like to paint my tracks off the kit since I don't coat my running gear with "mud". From experience, I know that an exact fit means that after putting a coat of paint on the running gear and tracks, the tracks will be too tight -and they were! I ended up pulling apart two links to pop the tracks back on and then squeezing in a bit of CR glue to get them to almost touch. Not noticeable unless really inspecting the area, but even one more link per side would have avoided this issue.

The paint job was a fun challenge. I think that's why I waited so long to build it. I used the Vallejo French tank color set and it worked out okay. The paints are formulated to be airbrushed straight from the bottle. Some paints were too thin and others were a tad too thick. Nothing could be done about the too thin ones, I'm talking to you yellow, but the thicker ones did well with a bit of thinner. Nothing new if you use Vallejo paints regularly. Lots of silly putty helped with the masking. I used a Micron 05 black pen to paint the outlines, and it worked great.

In the end, the kit looks great. I put it right next to the FT-17 I recently built and was surprised how close in size they were. Very tiny. Recommend if you're up to the challenge of a difficult paint job.