| Recent visitors |
 |
| James Johnson |
| Alan McNeilly |
| Miguel Hernandez |
| Kjeld Pedersen |
| William Bradley |
| Jeffry Fontaine |
| Eric Scurlock |
| Shiunhan Hau |
| Brian Lyall |
| James Wechsler |
| W. Kipp Anderson |
|
| Members today: 117 |
| Visitors today: 3844 |
|
|
|
Modeller Build Logs
Building the Dragon 1/72 Sd.Kfz. 164 Nashorn |
| By Christopher Wilson | | Started: | Oct 20, 2005 | | Updated: | Dec 26, 2005 |
|
Recently Dragon has done a brilliant job in expanding their line of 1/72 armor and giving braille scale fans some of what they want, a range of interesting subjects with increasingly impressive detail at a very reasonable price.
However, some of this comes at a cost. We still have vague instructions and one piece tracks when most braille scale modelers will tell you straight away what we want is link and length tracks.
I've watched Dragon's new kits steadily increase in quality from the coldly received Model 1940 T-34 through the Late model StuG IV.
This is my first look at Dragon's Nashorn. I've seen some controversy online in various forums as to the accuracy and buildability of the this kit.
The purpose of this blog will be to build the Dragon Nashorn as close to OOB as possible while pointing out any errors I find along the way. These include error in instructions and accuracy of the kit as well as fit of parts.
I plan to concentrate most on the buildability and what's in the box. There may be some accuracy issues that get overlooked and please feel free to point them out to me, I am no expert on the Nashorn and will not pretend to be. I will use my references to the best of my ability and point out what I find as I go through the steps of building this kit.
So let's build a 1/72 Nashorn.
|
|
|
|
| Chapter 4 - Starting the Upper Hull | Nov 10, 2005 |
OK, since I wanted to save the gun assembly for later I decided to start on the upper hull and fighting compartment next. So we are skipping ahead to step 6.
However, I have to say I find Dragon's instructions for this model to be one of their of their poorest efforts to date. Many things are simply implied and there is no reasonable order of assembly. This makes for a more difficult model than necessary and calls for a lot of dry fitting and some good references. At best they can simply be called ambiguous.
Those same references will come in handy when it comes time to build the fighting compartment because there are some things incorrect in Dragon's placement of things compared to photos of the real vehicle. I'll get to those later.
The upper and lower hull mate together on basically three parts, C1, C2 and B4. Take care to attach B4 to C1 first to avoid a nasty gap, the resulting seam is OK, it was there on the real vehicle. Then attach C2 to the hull, followed by the joined C1/B4 assembly.
The rear plate will have to be dealt with all by itself for problems I'll get to when the time comes, but for now it is put aside in the box.
One other thing I did at this step was to attach C15/C14/C22 to the hull. The reason is that during dry fitting I determined it would be difficult to get this right after the fighting compartment was on and I'd rather shape the fighting compartment to it and have a correct join and angle. So I did the opposite of what it appears Dragon suggests.
That is all there is to the basic structure and this gives us a nice platform to start the fighting compartment sides and rear, which is up next.
|
 |
|
|
