Rhino

Not the ordinary large legged animal, but a 1/72 scale armored beast. The scale is illustrated by the size of the boarding ladders.

See if you can figure the main components of this monster tank.

1) Top of an Empire ATAT.

2) Main Gatlin Gun is from a Gundam.

3) Chassis is a backward Sherman.

4) Track shields are from a Bradley.

And of course, there are fiber optics and LEDs

The side guns are scratch built from brass and plastic tubing, wires etc.

I used the Therapeutic Putty to mask for the camo pattern. I dug through my decal spares for appropriate markings.

Vince B  May 6,   2016

Gundam Conversion

Well, some of you may know about Gundams from Ban Dai. They come in various scales from 1/60 to 1/144 generally depicting any and every MECH from the various ANIME series over the past 20 years.  Yesterday I saw an encyclopedia of everyone of these thousands of kits.

The kits are fun as they are made to be posed, yes like action figures. Normally no glue is needed and the parts are very well made to not really need putty or paint.  The sprues for the parts are in the proper color configurations so the parts can be easily clipped and snapped into place with the polycaps so as to allow replacement or enhancements (After Market Parts) to be added.

OK, enough of the toy talk.  These kits can also be taken seriously.  You can use glue, paint and weathering as with ay other piece of armor. I have also added special lighting affects to the larger kits. I like the ones with the big Gatling guns.

I also went through my batch of spare decals to get some appropriate markings and logos.

Once I was finished, I used Super Glue to hold the joints in position.

I painted up the spikes to represent dragon's teeth. 

I used the Therapeutic (Panzer Putty)  for masking the layers of the camo coloring.

This kit represented a 1/144 scale MECH, but for my purpose, I called it 1/72.