Belgian M41G AFV Club + Verlinden Dio

[AlansModelMaking]

Evening all!
Some of you may have seen my Youtube channel, but I've never felt that I was ready to post anything here until now. I'm currently starting my first Diorama, and I'd like to chronicle a basic Build-Log sharing my experiences and trails with the kits. Due to time constraints I may not complete this until December of this year. But let's get stuck in!

The basic idea of this project is to follow this reference photo.
This is a Belgian M41 crossing a bridge during a Nato exercise around 1961.

My plan is to use these two kits to represent this.


The AFV Club M41G and Verlinden Productions US Steel Treadway.

I'll start off here with In-Box Review of the AFV Club M41G, and I'll do a mini-build log (not comprehensive) detailing my experiences and trails with the kit. I'll then move on the finishing touches of the dio.

Here's the sprues of the AFV Club M41G


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Will provide a new update in a day or two, see you then!

[lucasner]

looking forward to it!
Dave

[Coen]

Yup! Should be a cool build.

[AlansModelMaking]

Here's today's update. This is basically steps 1-5. I put the upper hull pieces in place to test their fit, and it fit together very well! I also finished the rear and suspension of the tank. When building the suspension, I found that I needed to be very careful wit the bars, or else they would've been out of alignment, so if you're building this kit just watch out. The shock absorbers got a little fiddly as well.

The instructions for the rear were drawn at an awkward angle. While I had built an M41 before, I still had some issues locating where all the bits needed to go, so just be careful when placing these parts. There was a good shot of the rear a few pages afterwards though.


Like many AFV Club kits, the M41 comes with separate fenders. I had hoped this wouldn't be an issue, but found that when I attempted to dryfit them there was a sizable gap present. I will search the web and attempt to fix this issue, so stay tuned!

[AlansModelMaking]

Today was road wheels' day! Everything went fairly well. The wheels and sprockets required only minimal clean up, the sprockets themselves lined up perfectly.

However, I encountered a small issue on the idler wheels. The idlers on the M41 have small holes to allow mud to be removed, the kit has you build the two wheels separately and then bring them together. There's no pins or horns to allow you to properly place these together. So you just have to use the MK.1 Eyeball to hopefully line up the holes from the two wheels. Not a major issue but just an small obstacle.

[AlansModelMaking]

I figured out a way to fix the fender gap! Just add a s**t ton of glue! I think I used about 1/4 of my tamiya bottle to get these fenders on, but it was worth it; the huge gap is gone! Took me about 10 minutes of maneuvering and pushing to get everything to stay in place. The fenders are basically welded on now.....

The dreaded gap is no more!

Also finished up the upper plate. The headlight guards were a nightmare for me to clean up though

[AlansModelMaking]

Nothing of interest really occurred so I've waited to post until now. This is the final built up stage of the kit before priming. The next update will be the basecoat!

Now the Tamiya putty is there because I didn't use many of the tool mounts and so I needed to fill the locating holes. Also the mantlet cover is not glued yet since I still need to paint it.

[Coen]

Very nice work Alan. That mantlet cover looks really cool.