With construction completed as much as possible it’s time for painting. All clear parts were masked with Tamiya tape. The first thing I did was to give the metal components an airbrushing with Alclad Grey Primer & Microfiller reasoning that this will give the acrylic paint a good surface to adhere to.
Tamiya NATO Black is applied to the lower hull and running gear.
Above I’ve applied the AMMO’s Warm Sand-Yellow to the lower hull and running gear. Sorry folks, but to me
it just didn’t look right being to yellow to my eyes!
I decided to experiment and do a comparison of AMMO’s colours against Meng’s suggested colours of Vallejoe 71.075 Light sand. Both colours were applied to each of the exhaust mesh heat shields. These were then compared against Meng’s colour profile and more importantly, photos of the vehicle in theatre. I decided to go with the Vallejoe colours, to me being the more correct colour! A similar comparison was done with the brown camo colour and once again I went with the Vallejoe colour!
Before fitting the tracks they were sprayed XF-84 Iron Black with a thinned over-spray of a mixed concoction of Humbrol Brick Red, Matt Black and silver. To ease construction, I added an extra link than suggested by the instructions giving a little more length and the placed the tracks around the idlers and wheels. The tracks were then placed on the jig to ease the joining of the ends of the tracks. The joining link wasn’t painted and simply rotated tom the top of the hull where it can’t be seen.
With the tracks on and the side skirts fitted, and the running gear is masked ready for the painting of the hull.
The Vallejo Light Sand was a little troublesome to spray. Even thinned, it had a tendency to block the needle of my airbrush on several occasions.
Photos of the vehicles in-theatre showed a light pinkish hue to the exhausts. To simulate this I used Pro Modeller (now Flory Models) Rust Wash dabbed on with a clean brush and left to dry.