MENG MAGACH6B 2nd Part

MAGACH 6B BUILD

PART 2

Upon opening the box, I counted 17 sprues. I also noted that the upper hull/engine deck is in 13 pieces. The wheels have separate tires with rims molded in that fit over the hubs. Not sure why this is done, but there it is.

First build step is assembling the sprockets and wheels.

 Each road wheel set consists of a tire, inner hub, polycap, outer hub and tire. That's right folks, five pieces per set for fourteen sets of road wheels. The sprockets were just an inner piece, polycap and outer piece.

Here are the completed sprockets and road wheels.

The next step will be inserting the mounts for the torsion bars in the lower hull.

With the torsion bar mounts installed, the next step is to put on much of the attaching hardware to the lower hull.

So far, things are going about as I expected. Assembling the wheels was tedious, but they are nicely detailed and I encountered no fit problems. There are a fair amount of small parts associated with steps 3 and 4 but nothing that I would consider unmanageable. Be careful not to trim off the tips of the bump stops for the swing arms as they are trimmed from the sprue. I failed to note this until it was too late., but these parts will be hidden by the road wheels so I am not concerned about them being seen.

As Vince pointed out, there are some differences in the way the kits have been designed and subsequently how they are meant to go together. What I find interesting is that we both completed up to step 4 and are at similar points along the build. One of the things that we noted while examining the lower hull is that there are additional details molded into the lower hull on the Meng kit that are not present on the Academy version. I expect to continue to see more of this as we proceed through the build.

Look for more posts as the days pass by. Everyone be safe.