Finishing Touches

At last, the finished model, shown here with its little brother.





To finish up, I started with a black wash to add a bit of weathering. This part actually ended up being a little tricky. When the base coat dried, it dried very smooth. When I added the wash, it didn’t lay quite right, and had to go over some parts several times. The overall effect came out alright, but not exactly what I was hoping for.


The periscope ports were painted gold, like the driver’s periscope on an Abrams tank, and the pintle MG was painted metallic black. I decided not to do any drybrushing on this model, and go for a more natural look.



For the antenna, I drilled a small hole in the roof, and superglued a single bristle from a long-bristled nylon brush I bought just for this purpose.



Here is the model shown with the miniatures for which it’s intended. These are also Ground Zero Games figures from the NAC army (although in my particular background, they’re UN troops). As you can see, the scale came out quite nice.



Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed following along on this project with me. I’ll post another picture of the entire platoon, once all four are complete.

Base Coat & Hover Skirt

Finding a material for the hover skirt was difficult. What I finally found was the rubber insulation around a large gauge wire. I pulled out the wires on the inside, because it was too difficult to work with otherwise. I superglued it around the undercarriage, and it held pretty well.



I had to hold it a while, because it wanted to pull away from the sides, but once the superglue set, it worked fine. I liked the color of it as is, so I decided to paint the base coat of the model before attaching the hover skirt. Small cuts could be seen in the area where the ends of the wire meet, but these can be filled with superglue. I probably will do a light black wash over the hover skirt as well, but I wanted to have to paint it as little as possible.

The Undercarriage

This is a model to be used for gaming, so some would say, “Why bother with the bottom, you won’t see it anyway?” However, there are some who would say (you know who you are), “If a model is not complete, it can’t be used in a game.” This is a GEV, but there are no visible fans or jets to give forward propulsion, so I had to come up with some way for the vehicle to direct its movement. My theory is that the GEV uses vectored thrust to give direction, and all this is under the hover skirt. With this system, the vehicle could move in any direction, and even spin in place if necessary. The vents would provide the necessary ground effect, as well as direction. I needed something to represent this, so I drew out and etched in vents under the vehicle. The undercarriage needed to be raised away from the bottom of the vehicle by 6mm, so as to allow room for the hover skirt. This piece allows for that space, and also gives a good, solid frame to which I could later attach the hoverskirt.

Fiddly Bits

Two details merit special attention – the commander’s hatch & cupbola, and the pintle machine gun. The hatch on the original has 8 view ports around the cupbola. To create this effect, I traced the outline of the viewports on a square of plastic, and cut away the unnecessary bits with a hobby knife. It takes a steady hand!

The hatch itself is a wheel cover from a KV-1 kit, and the hinge is that same light gauge wire. Cutting out circles is troublesome, and what I have to do is cut away as much as possible with the hobby knife, and then sand the edges off to get it round.




The machine gun started life as a bit of armor plating which had a little notch in it that looked like an MG breech to me. I cut the piece in two and glued the halves together to make the body of the MG.


I used a barrel of a .30 MG from an old Stuart tank model. There are 5(!) machine guns in the kit. Apparently, two of the MG were not used in combat – not sure what they would be used for, but since most of my models are for gaming, and not for display, there’s no need for parts which won’t be used in combat, so they became barrels for my pintle MG. The trigger guard is a leftover KV-1 piece, and the post, once again, is light gauge wire.

Advanced Detailing

During the process of detailing, I found that one of the armor panels in my “extras box” of pieces left over from old model kits matched well with one of the armor panels on the side of the APC. From there, I added extra parts, trying to keep things as close to the original as possible. A rectangular panel on the 6mm mini became a tool box, the back of a fuel can was used in the place of a round bit on the original. I also departed a little from the original at this point. I added a periscope viewport for the driver, figuring that, even in the near future they’ll still need to use the old “Mark 1 Eyeball.” The original model also has a rotary cannon mounted on the top, but I didn’t use that. The game that I use this model with is Dirtside (now out of print, but can be downloaded for free from the Ground Zero Games website – well worth the download, if you enjoy 1/300 scale micro-armor games), and in that gaming system, I preferred to arm this APC with an upward-launching guided missile (for 360º arc of fire), and a pintle-mounted machine gun. These are not represented on the 6mm mini, but I decided to model them on the 25mm model. The MG was a little tricky, and will be covered in a later post, but creating the missile launcher was a fairly simple bit of modeling.



I simply cut a bit of sprue (the little plastic “tree” to which the model parts are attached), drilled out a hole with a pin vise and the largest bit I had, then sanded the side at an angle until it sat flush on the side of the APC.




Another nice thing about the Ground Zero Games mini is that it has a fair amount of detail for such a small model, down to the placement of hinges and handles on doors. That meant I needed them on the 25mm model as well. For these details I used small sections of light gauge wire held in place with super glue.


For this I didn’t use the gel type, but the liquid type, placed on the model with a pin. The original mini also has what appears to be a ventilation grille over the driver’s compartment. The pin vise came in handy here also.




I marked out where the grilles should be, drilled the ends of the lines, and then carved the grilles directly into the plastic with a hobby knife, taking care not to cut all the way through the plastic. The view ports/firing ports along the sides of the model were also drilled into rectangles of plastic with the pin vise.

Basic Detailing

Once the corpus of the APC was built, it was time to add detail. I began by noting the position and size of doors and armor plates on the original, and placed them on the model. Some of the door corners were rounded, and some were square. The rounded corners were easily achieved by sanding. I used a lot of the scrap pieces left over from making the body for hatches, corners, and such. I have to economize as much as possible, since I haven’t been able to find sheet styrene here in Khabarovsk. I travel through Moscow at least once a year, so I use that time to stock up on materials and kits I can’t find. There’s a great hobby shop in Moscow, with lots of photo-etch parts, diorama accessories, etc. available (that’s their website on my links, but it’s all in Russian – be forewarned!).




After basic detailing there was some more advanced detailing to be done, and there were a couple of tricky bits, so I’ll cover that in my next post.

The Driver's Seat

Once the basic body was built, I proceeded to construct the driver’s compartment. The Ground Zero Games model has an unusual driver’s compartment on the left side of the vehicle. I followed the same basic construction process as the body, cutting out a frame, and then gluing on the top and front.




This is where I ran into my first mistake in the conception process. When I had made the line drawing, I had the front of the compartment extended out over the front of the body (as on the original model) on the side view, but neglected to reflect that on the front view. It worked out fine, however, since I made the sides by laying styrene on the model and working from that, so the mistake corrected itself.

Building the body

The first step of any project is the plan. Since I already had the 6mm scale mini, I simply measured all the sides and multiplied by 4 (yes, I realize that only gives me a 24mm scale model, not 25mm, but dealing in fractions of millimeters was just too taxing for me). From there, I made a 3D 1:1 scale drawing of the model I was going to make. Some of the measurements required “fudging,” and I found that I had made some conceptual mistakes along the way, but most were easily fixed. One important hint a friend of mine told me a while back was not to worry about measuring the angles, measure the sides. If you measure all the sides correctly and draw them in their correct relationship to one another, the angles draw themselves. This method works well for a “box” design, but doesn’t work for sides which cannot be seen and measured in profile on the 3D drawing. For that, I had to use another method.

I began by creating a basic frame out of styrene. Styrene is my scratchbuilding material of choice, because it’s easy to work with and durable. After measuring the inner struts for the frame, I trimmed off about a millimeter, since the styrene I was using was .8mm in thickness. Another nice thing about styrene is that it can be sanded. I used sandpaper to bevel the inside edges, so that the seams as tight as possible.

After I made the basic frame, I added the sides and front. Since the model has a slight “bulge” at the bottom, I decided to work down from the top of the model, that way any inconsistencies that came about in the construction process would be less visible.




The corners are a little tricky, since they can’t be directly measured from the 3D drawing. Plus, the fact that they are triangular, without any parallel sides makes the “side measuring” method impossible. The way around that I found was to just place the sheet styrene directly over the space to be covered, and marking off the corners. Then, I simply cut the piece to fit, and sanded down the edges. I used this same method to fill in all the corner pieces.

First Project - Gauntlet APC

I've been getting into scale modeling lately, mostly as an offshoot of my miniatures gaming habit. I've decided to start chronicling projects I'm working on, the first of which is a 25mm scratchbuilt Gauntlet hover APC. I have the model in 6mm scale (shown here in action), and I decided to build a platoon of them from scratch. Sure, I could buy the resin kits directly from Ground Zero Games, but what's the fun in that? Hope you enjoy the project