On Patrol (Nutcracker Hovertank & Gustav power armor suits)
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I've just finished a month long build of the Hasegawa 1:35 kit of the P.K.H. 103 Nutcracker Hovertank & P.K.A. ausf G Gustav power armor suits from Kow Yokoyama's Maschinen Krieger universe. These excellent kits are light years ahead of the original kits produced by Nitto in the early - mid '80s.
I built these mostly out of the box, adding very little enhancement, mainly just a bit of photoetch metal mesh to the big antenna and some PE discs inside the tops of every smoke discharger. I did add a wire antenna to replace the tall antenna, because I could just see that snapping off and getting lost. The only other enhancements I added were scratch built camoflage netting on the Gustav power armors, some of the decals, and some cast texture (turret) & non-skid texture (top of the hull) which was added with putty.
The kits were primed with Mr Surfacer Red Oxide 1000, then hand brushed with my proprietary Panzergelb mix and hand camoflaged. Weathering was achieved via Tamiya Weathering Pigments and Tamiya Panel Liners plus hand ground oil pastels.
The base is 1" pink insulation foam board, roughly 12.5"x12.5" square, with a dry creek bed gouged through it. I covered the sides and bottom with thin veneer craft wood, sanded, puttied, sanded more, then painted black. It was then coated with spackle, and, when dry, given a thick coat of my Panzergelb mix, upon which I coated it with dirt from the planting area of my yard. When that was dry, I sprayed it heavily with Tamiya TS-1 Red Brown, then misted heavily over the top of the raised details with TS-3 Dark Yellow. I added various colors and shades of powdered static grasses stabilized by thinned PVA glue, tweaked the colors and shading with ground oil pastels, stabilized those with thinned Dulcote, repainted the wood on the sides and bottom with thinned Black 3.0, Dremeled my mark and the date into the bottom with a burr bit, painted them in with red, and called it done.
UPDATE: This build took Second Place in the Miscellaneous Sci-Fi category at the IPMS MOSS CON show in Springfield, MO, on 29 April.
