Armortek series 1 landrover kit

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

Chassis built up and painted and the rear axle fitted.

I opted to paint in an aluminium silver colour as the Landy was originally meant to have a zinc dipped finish as a rust proofing measure.

But it was expensive and so silver paint was adopted early on.

[John MCParticipant @johnmc39344]

The Armortek kits are impressive.  Some years ago I was involved in terramechanics experiments.  Using full size vehicles, in this case large tracked vehicles, would have been very expensive.  Not only running the vehicles but finding enough land for the experiments.  Altering the characteristics of the land would be difficult and expensive.

The answer was to by model vehicles, around the one sixth scale.  We bought a couple of tracked vehicles, both expensive and unreliable.  We spent more time repairing them than experimenting.  On the occasions these models worked properly the experiments gave good results, good enough to try out on full size vehicles.

Unfortunately the unreliability was getting worse.  I then saw an advertisement for Armortek, visited them, the result being that we bought what amounted to a tank chassis.

This was about 10 -12 years ago.  The Armortek vehicle performed perfectly then and is still performing well now, I am told.  It took everything we did with it without complaint.  It ran on and through sand and clay, wet and dry, in just about every condition possible.  Often (very) overloaded, carrying, pulling and pushing heavy loads.

The reliability, I think, was down to a well thought design and good quality manufacture.

 

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

John.

Thank you for your message, it’s nice to hear from someone with real world experience of tracked vehicles for a point of view on Armortek kits.

The Centurion tank I built was a beast, so rugged and well designed. I can imagine you being able to use an Armortek chassis as a test bed as you described.

In a previous life I was a road collision investigation officer and I considered building something like the bomb disposal “wheelbarrow” to provide a radio controlled vehicle to assist at scenes. Something that could be used to provide mobile illumination, that would help with identifying marks on the road surface, as well as a paint applicator to spot mark the skid marks which really needed two guys to do, one to see the mark and one to apply the paint. Even in daylight conditions it would gave been a great addition. But time and other things got in the way and I never got anywhere,  an Armortek chassis would have done it in no time.

I’m enjoying this build but it’s a lot more fiddly, purely because of the design constraints of modelling a sixth scale thin skinned vehicle.

Mick

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

Work is continuing on the chassis,  but as its Christmas i decided to spend a bit of time out of the shop and sorting the parts for the Landrover bodywork.

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

This is the sheet metal for the rear bed, it’s all bolt together in kit form but obviously is riveted mostly in full size.

I will dry fit the parts together and see what needs to be done to achieve a closer facsimile of the Landrover I am basing my build on.

It won’t be a scale replica but will certainly enhance the look of the basic kit.

 

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

Spent an hour dry fitting these panels together so I can see the layout and start to assess which fastenings can stay, which need to be disguised and which need to be ditched and replaced with aluminium rivets to scale size.

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

I bought the excellent How (not) to paint a locomotive today.

Chris Vine gives a heck of a lot of insight and information about painting complex models like a steam loco.

The Landy won’t be anywhere near as complicated but I’ve already picked up a lot of ideas for when I reach the painting stage myself.

Just storing and mixing the paint has thrown up a few homegrown bits of kit I will be building in the near future.

Well worth reading if you are serious about paint finish.

[Author]

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