01.28.2006 » Concepts / Intro

Finally! Here's another diorama project that I have been planning for well over a year, but just haven't gotten around to. The excuse for this one is good though. I really needed practice at armor and to become a better modeler to pull it off. With the completion of my KV-2, and while my mindset is with AFVs, I think it's time to finally start this one.

This diorama will consist of the Tamiya JGSDF Light Armored Vehicle, Tamiya JGSDF Iraq Humanitarian Assistance Team, Academy Mutt Jeep, and 2 Bandai Raiden Tactical Armor Type 17's from the anime 'Gasaraki'. The setting will be the Middle East and will depict a deployment of the TA's based on intel from a local security officer. The officer will be driving the Mutt Jeep which (in my alternate universe imaginary timeline) was part of some long-ago U.S. arms deals where old surplus equipment was given to Middle Eastern countries/freedom-fighters/whatevers in exchange for intelligence/etc... The Jeep has long since been repainted and will have a worn desert feel. The JGSDF equipment will be painted in desert camoflague in buff and green as seen below.

« LAV not to scale with TA

I've been wanting to do a desert setting for a while now and I think this is just the project to do it with. I've got my desert MIG Pigments ready (Beach Sand and Gulf War Sand) and am raring to go! I'll be making little modifications to the TAs to make them look more in-line with the LAV. I'll likely make a new weapon for one and also do one with more armor as more of a "point-man". The knees in particular are screaming for more defensive armor. They look like an RPG could take them right out. I might make something like hockey-goalie shin-gaurds with reactive armor. Maybe... It'll be a try and see thing and only used if it looks good.

Base-wise this won't be an excessively large dio. Only about 13-14" x 8-10". That gives me enough room for the jeep, LAV, one sitting Raiden and one walking, a wall, some refuse/rubble, figs, a palm tree, and a nice amount of "white space" to boot. The ground-work will be a sandy, dusty lot with small stones strewn about. There will be rubble from the old wall and a fridge and other "garbage" from a resin refuse set p-trax picked up for me. The sitting TA will have the pilot climbing into the mech from the rear hatch. I'll have to heavily modify a fig for that. The arab jeep driver will be the driver that came with the jeep, but with a beard and head-wrap and a modified pose.

01.30.2006 » M151A2 Mutt

I decided to start on the Mutt jeep first as it needs the most work and will likely be dropped if I did it last. It's just so poorly molded with huge pin-marks, lots of flash, and inaccurate as well. Normally as most of you know, accurracy is not my thing, but then why be accurate on a giant robot that doesn't exist anyway? I made the mistake of looking for photo reference of the jeep and found a lot of things that I'm changing. Other things I'm removing or scratch-building just because the original parts are so bad.

First off image-wise is the lower chassis with the rear and side-walls glued on.

There's gaps of course on the front fenders which added shims of sheet styrene to to fill. I thinned the hood underneath in order to make a dent. This will hopefully help the kit to look more old and beaten. I also removed the guide-tabs on the rear fender-tops that were for the antenna brackets.

The tires are wreird in that the back-sides are a seperate piece that you glue in and fill the seam on. Personally, I'd rather have 2 halves for these than have a weird spot to sand, but it's not a huge deal. Although I say that having not sanded them yet. I used an exacto to scrape off the flash around the tires. I drilled out the molded-in headlights on the Jeep and have since filled them with apoxy sculpt to make concave surfaces. I'll use clear Wave lenses to make new headlamps.

A comparison shot of the Mutt to the JGSDF Light Armored Vehicle. I can't wait to start the LAV as you can see, the body is molded so nicely and crisply. Unlike the damn bad-molded Mutt.

Next up is a shot of the Mutt looking more jeep-like. I've since replaced the brace-bar for the machine gun stand with wire and made a new mount for the pole. I need to take more pics as I'm a few days behind on in-progress images.

02.01.2006 » M151A2 Mutt Customized

I was looking through a box of M-10 tank parts that I use for details and such for a set of headlights to replace the Mutt kit ones with. The Mutt ones were horribly molded so they needed replaced or a lot of work. I opted for replacing them. While looking through those parts, I came across the machine gun for the old WW2 tank and thought it looked way cooler and more menacing than the one that came with the jeep so I modified the stand and cleaned up the tank machine gun to use instead. It's bigger, beefier, and well... cooler. I had some resin ammo boxes for it so I set those in the back of the jeep along with a backpack. I made straps for the jeep from lead-foil. (Thanks Bill and Barry!) I liked the steering wheel for the tank better as well and replaced the kit shovel with one from an M-8 Greyhoung that had the mount staps molded on. Antenna was made from stretched sprue and coiled wire. Aside from finishing the main headlights on the front, this is about ready for primer. Here's some pics:

02.01.2006 » JGSDF Light Armored Vehicle

Man... I am so glad that I built the Mutt jeep first because it's poor molding and part-fit is making me appriciate just how wonderful the JGSDF LAV from Tamiya is. I believe this kit came out on 2004 or so. I've had it for about a year I think. Very nice crisp molding. REALLY nice crisp molding. I'm impressed enough that I might pick up a second one and build it later and I'm only about 1/2 way through the first. Enough gushing... onto the pics:

First up is the body test-fitted to the pre-primed die-cast chassis. That's right... METAL! It's nice and heavy and seems to work rather well. Some of the suspension parts will actually screw into the chassis. The body as you see in the first pic is all molded in one piece. I'm not sure what kind of crazy multi-part mold they used, but its vents are hollow/see-through and the tow-rings are molded onto the body. At least those ones, there's more to come. It has a nice non-slip texture molded into the body, but I'm not sure how well it'll show-up after priming and painting.

Next is a few shots of the beautiful suspension. It was designed so well that I only had 8 tiny seams and some flash to clean-up. It looks very nice and detailed as well. It's a shame that a lot of that will be hidden once the tires and rest of the body are attached.

The tires are molded in a soft black vinyl. They're really nice and the metal chassis gives weight to them. The wheels actually have metal pins that push into polycaps in the suspension which is just awesome to me as a Gundam modeler. The tires have a very small line of flash down the center that I'll try to sand off later. Real tires have some flash, but this is out of scale and would be worn down after use anyway.

The interior is very nice and will provide a new challenge to me as I'm so used to painting everything at once. I'll have to build/paint/weather the interior first them do the outside. Fun! The dash (not pictured) is very nice and detailed and the seats just look beautiful to me. The only problem there is minor injector marks on the back which are easily sanded, puttied and sanded again.

02.08.2006 » Boxed up

The LAV is ready for primer and paint so is being set aside for now while I work on the next parts of this project. I wanted to make this base resemble a staging and resupply area in the desert. To do that I went looking for armor updates sets for stowage and whatnot. There's a lot of expensive stuff out there that looks good, but can be made myself for cheap. One is cardboard boxes of MREs and bottled water. In Illustrator I made a box template then added the text and such based on reference images I found. The MRE boxes are US, because I couldn't find references for JGSDF ones. The bottled water ones are of my own design based on those I've seen.

I need to get some thin and smooth brown paper for the MRE boxes. I used brown packing paper for the test one and it's too grainy in texture. See below.

Below are the templates I made for the boxes. At some point I'll make a PDF of these for everyone that's interested.

I have an old scrap of MDF board that I'm using for the base. I'll add a frame around it later to make it look nice. I sketched on top of the board where I want everything to be placed to get a rough idea of how everythink will fit. The Ishtar is sitting where the sitting Raiden will be. The arrow below the scribble to the left is where the walking raiden will go. Behind the wall will be a palm tree and more stowage/rubbish. You can also see a few crushed water bottle boxes. One is flattened, the one behind the jeep has some flattened clear-plastic heat-formed tubes I made to be smashed water bottles.

To add to the piles of stuff I used an extra wheel, oil drums, german tank ammo crates and a large wooden equipment crate I made from styrene strips. I'll be adding more to the piles later such as tarps, ammo cases, and more.

Finally for this update I needed the driver for the jeep. I found some pics of Afghan and Taliban fighters and am modding a Tamiya German Tank Loding Crew fig to be my arabic driver. One of the figs was bending down to pick up a shell from one of the crates. I decided to use him and modify him to be loading an MRE box into his jeep. Click here for some figure reference from Armorama. I need to modify his clothing a but to add the vest and long shirt thing. Shouldn't be any more difficult than the batman I modified from a US soldier fig. I've already started the beard, mustache and head-wrap.

02.09.2006 » Modified Color Schemes

This was talked about and figured out in the forum, but I wanted to put it in my in-prog page as well. I went searching for a JGSDF desert camo scheme and that search was not easy. A few friends of mine in Japan had no idea and no amount of searching came up with anything. Finally I found an image of a JGSDF Type 82 with a brown/tan scheme so based the next images off that.

I'll be using the last scheme for the Raiden and LAV as I found the one in the pic to be somewhat darker than I'd like. Then BK gave me an idea to make some of the leg parts on one Raiden green to suggest that they were recently replaced and still had the factory paint-scheme. That scheme is below and you can see the green on the lower left leg. I think it adds a nice bit of visual interest.

08.29.2006 » Back to work...

Been a while, but I'm back on this project. In order not to have it become an overwhelming project, I'm taking it a little at a time. First I'm almost ready for weathering the LAV. When that is done I'll finish up the Jeep since it just needs painted as well. Then I'll do both the Raiden TAs and finally the figures and diorama.

But first off the LAV. I primed it with dark gray duplicolor then gave it a base coat of Tamiya Khaki, followed with XF-73 JGSDF Dark Green. This is different from what I planned above, but give yourself 6 months and ideas will change. Not completely mind you, one of the TA will be desert and the other will be painted in this same scheme just to mix it up as if the JGSDF was brought in as a humanitarian force, thus the non-desert color, but got dragged into a broader conflict. This was some machines, the ones that were there longer haven't gotted the full desert scheme painted on them.

I hand-painted all the little details then gave everything a gloss-coat of FFA to smooth the surface for the decals. When all the decals and small bits ere painted I gave all the armor a satin finish. Normally I'd do flat, but the Mig FAQ book suggested satin so I figured I'd give it a whirl and see how it works. I actually like the satin as it's flat-ish, but still has a "sheen" to it which helps with the realism I think. Here's a few pics, none with the satin yet as that's curing.

08.30.2006 » Satin and Filters

Today I added a few filters to my LAV today. This was my first time trying the technique so it was hit and miss. My first filter's result was not much of a change. I used a very thin sandy color. My second filter (yellow-orange) done much later did better to filter the color, but the end result was similar to that of a wash in places. I believe the problem was that I left too much of the filter pool in places. The good news is that it looks like a sandy wash which weill happen next anyway so no worries.

Anyway here's a few pics. The first 2 are of the LAV with just the satin-coat. The last image is after both filters were applied. Sadly they're not showing up in the images, but believe me, they look nice and add to the look.

08.31.2006 » Lights and Mirrors

Today I added the lights and mirrors as well as masked off/painted the amber lights on the front and front-sides. This was done with a base of Alclad Aluminum covered with Tamiya Clear Orange. The mirrors were painted with Alclad Chrome and look fantastic!

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