Comets Coming Together

With April coming to a close it has actually been a pretty busy month despite what the blog might suggest. I've been playing some X-Wing, checking out a pretty awesome new Auckland store, chatting to Ben from Breakthrough Assault (a lot) and chipping away at 11th Armoured Division.

Currently I am still in the assembly phase and I was really struggling with the new Comet plastics to get a rhythm going and then something suddenly clicked at our regular Thursday night work hobby evening... I just assembly lined up my last five Comets and (doing 5 vehicles at once)

1. clipped off the lower hull, upper hull and hull rear plate and glued together
2. clipped off turret top, bottom, bin, mantlet, then glued together
3. clipped of hatch, light and gun and glued
4. turret pins clipped and glued
5. hull plated clipped and glued
6. machine-gun section of the frame removed from the rest, clipped and glued
7. last but not least, tracks clipped out but not glued! Going to be painting them separately and attaching at the end!

It took me more than an hour, but less than two and I was pretty happy about that effort given two tanks a couple of weeks earlier took me about the same amount of time. I did learn though that a pair of really fine clippers is a must for some of those finer parts. I'd been using my large GF9 clippers and they are just too big and unfortunately I'd left my smaller ones at home. Luckily I borrowed Aaron's Tamiya ones and they worked a charm.

With the 10 Comets now all assembled, it is time to hit the M5 halftracks and Universal Carriers. I have a bit of a deadline to hit though as our offices are going to be moving in about a month and the new place doesn't have quite the space for airbrushing that we have now and I'd like to break the back of this army (and my Panzerschreck one) before the move...

Good luck achieving that I say!