One Kit Is Never Enough Part 7 - Final Assembly

One Kit Is Never Enough Part 7 - Final Assembly

The one thing that is annoying when you go through a change of interest such as I have done in the last couple of years is that you have no stash. That has been brought home to me on this build as I have no Allied items to use as stowage and cannot afford to buy any of the excellent aftermarket sets that are about right now. This may not be such a drawback on the T-19 as I am not sure if they did have a lot of stowage. There is definitely a lack of internal crew stowage space on the T-19 so I think it would be correct to assume that most of the crews personnel items would be carried on the outside of the halftrack. However, seeing as there is only enough internal room to stow 8 shells i would think most of the crews kit is stowed on a support vehicle.  If I had had some in the stash I would have included some bedrolls on the fenders at least. I could have made them from magic sculpt but just did not do so. Why? I have no idea. I think this could be to do with the lack of reference photographs showing the placement of the stowage, or just a general laziness on my part!

Anyways, laziness or not I started to finish the T-19 by adding a coat of Humbrol Matt Varnish. Once this had dried I started to weather the superstructure of the T-19 using LifeColor Dust Type 1(LC-UA705. I did this using an Iwata Eclipse CS airbrush. I made up a mixture of Lifecolor thinners and the Dust Type 1. I do not have exact figures for the Dust to thinner ratio, but at a guess i would say it was in the region of 70% thinners to 30% paint. The advantage of using water based acrylics is the drying time. By the time I had finished the Dust Type 1 and cleaned my airbrush I was able to start spraying the second dust coat. For this I used LifeColor Dust Type 2(LC-UA706). The Dust Type 1 has a more pronounced greyish appearance than the Type 2 so there is a good contrast.

While the second application of Dust was drying I did some work on the interior, using both dust colours, this time with a paint brush as the applicator. When all of this had dried I used some Mig Pigments Gulf War Sand and some Mig Pigments Light Dust. I used a cut down stiff brush to work the pigments into recessed areas before applying a few drops of Tamiya Thinner to hold the pigments in place.

And that is that. I am calling this one finished for now as I cannot think of anything else to do to it.

So what are my thoughts on this kit now it is finished?

Overall I am fairly happy with how this has turned out; the one thing I am not happy about is the final assembly of the driver’s compartment and the rear compartment. I think, much like their Sdkfz 251’s that you have to be 100% accurate with this part of the build. If you look closely there is a small gap behind the passenger’s door where the door stanchion meets the rear compartment. No matter what I did here I could not get that gap to close. At this late stage I did not want to have to apply filler and then repaint. When I built a couple of the DML 251’s I found there was a similar problem when joining the upper and lower hull. After talking to a few other people who had a similar problem it seemed to be down to the way the lower fighting hull sides were located. As this is my first build of any of the M3 halftrack variants I will wait and see before determining where exactly the problem is. It is more than likely it is an error I have made, which is more than annoying to say the least.  

Other than that this has been an enjoyable build and the 105mm howitzer is a very nice kit in itself and about as accurate as you can get. Overall I would say this kit deserves an 85-90% rating and i would recommend if to anyone who enjoys building Allied AFV’s.