4. Everything Now

 One advantage of using the Dragon M4A3 105mm kit is that the wheels and tyres are moulded as separate parts, this was considered as completely stupid many years ago, but turns out to be a very useful thing indeed for this build, the Dragon plastic also seems to be very brittle (poor quality) which seems to make it better for destruction work, feathering edges and things like that, it just seems to be easier to work with when compared with the Tamiya wheels.

 Picture below, this just shows how the separately moulded tyres can work to your advantage when doing a rusty wreck such as this, it makes it much simpler to replicate tyres that have broken up and lost sections in chunks, plus they can be set so as they look like they are breaking away from the wheel itself, most of the wheels were butchered to within in an inch of their life, very heavy damage to be honest, and a couple of Tamiya wheels had to be used in the end.

 Picture below, the HVSS (Highly Volatile Silly Suspension) has also been attacked with a Minicraft tool fitted with a very small rotary bur, the front set of wheels is not finished yet because I'm still a little undecided on how to make them look, I'll probably go with smaller more heavily destroyed wheels, and it has to said that if you are doing a rusty tank wreck then it's probably best not to pick something with lots and lots of small wheels, because it can get a bit boring grinding and destroying the wheels, It really does seem to take forever.

 The hull itself still needs texture adding to the sides, and some rusty rotted out sponsons need to be added at some point, or in other words, It's a long way from finished yet, plus a very basic interior needs to be added at the front under the crew hatches, (more great big open holes that you can see through) which means I need to scratch a very basic transmission at some point, plus lots of metal junk and stuff to fill up the inside a bit to stop it looking so empty inside, the engine compartment just has a part of the drive shaft laying in it as far as I can see, and not much else.

 Like a complete fool I glued some of the suspension parts to the hull which was a very bad mistake this early in the build to be honest because I still haven't decided on how exactly I'm going to paint the damn thing, whether to do all the rust with an airbrush, or whether to use a stipple brush painting method, but anyway, It wasn't a good idea to glue them just yet.

 Matt