Malayan Campaign Type 95 Ha Go | FineMolds

Dryfitting the top half of the hull onto the unfinished chassis. Looking good so far. 

1mm bit for my pin vise sure came in handy for the barrel here! 

Everything, including the tracks and turret, is done. Just need to figure out the stages in which I'll be painting/gluing the running gear and skirts, and I can get to priming sometime soon. 

Finally managed to assemble the link-and-length tracks *without* gluing them to the wheels, and *without* gluing the wheels to the hull. This will make painting *a lot* easier. Had to use some putty on the rear of the road wheel bogeys to fix them in place, as the fit was very loose and they kept falling off, making assembly of the lower half of the tracks quite difficult.

Now onto the other side... 

Beautiful! Really pleased with this -- and on the first try, too. Like I said, this will make painting with an airbrush so much easier. No need for pesky masking of the wheels which would otherwise take up a big chunk of time. Better to break my back and squint my eyes now gluing these together for an hour than to have a lackluster result later. 

Everything's puttied and sanded and ready to be primed. Turret is dryfit onto the hull. 

Everything primed. I'm usually not too anal about priming layers, so long as it's fairly uniform and there's something for the paint to adhere to. The turret is still separate, but I think I may pose it at this angle once everything's done. 

 

Main bit of painting for the turret and hull is completed, now just need to touch up the yellow where the blutac failed, then detail paint the machine guns and a few other things. 

 

A sneak peak at the exhaust, which I achieved using drybrushed Vallejo acrylics and a little bit of oil paints thinned with enamel thinner. 

 

Made some mistakes by allowing pigment fixer to leak here and there (particularly on the track skirts) but otherwise was very pleased with the result.