Just Made It (Again)!

This model has just sneaked into Neglected Model May and I really had to push myself in the last week to get it finished!  I painted it in conjunction with another model, but that one doesn’t form part of the challenge, so it will get its own post to follow this one.

The tank featured here is not that well known and if anyone identified it, well done!  It’s a Japanese Type 92 combat car (the term the cavalry coined for light tanks, virtually paralleling US practice) and it entered service with Japanese cavalry units in the 1930s.  Less than 200 were built and it served in China and Manchuria.  Construction was advanced for the time, since the vehicle was welded as opposed to bolted or riveted, but it was only very lightly armoured.  Armament was a turret-mounted 6.5mm machine gun with a heavy 13.2mm machine gun in the hull front.

I have waited years for a model of this tank and have thought about trying to scratchbuild one on several occasions.  So last year I was really pleased to find that one had just become available from Shapeways.  Shapeways market and produce 3-D printed items, so I’m really moving into the 21st Century with this model (maybe not – I haven’t got a smartphone and don’t use Facebook)!  I think a 1:72 resin model of the tank is available, but I’ve never seen it, so I thought I’d get the Shapeways one.  Detail is very good and the model only came in two pieces, the complete hull plus the whole turret.  The model represents a late manufacture Type 92 with four large roadwheels per side.

So although all I had to assemble was the turret to the hull, this model has sat for about eight months in its basic light brown colour!  I wanted to get my Japanese Type 89 medium tanks finished first (that’s one of them on the road behind the Type 92), and they formed my contribution to the February Neglected Model challenge, so I thought it was now about time to get the last of my Japanese tanks in early war camouflage finished.  I was away for work last week, so decided to take a couple of tank models with me to paint in my hotel.  I’d stayed in the same hotel before, so knew that I’d have a desk and chair and that the lighting was good enough to paint basic tank camouflage schemes.  I was quite pleased to get the basic paint scheme finished and that let me put the thinned-down mucky/shade coat on when I got home, followed by a light drybrush to pick out detail!  I also had to go back and add  some darker shading over the two darker cammo colours.  Since I was also away over the holiday weekend, I didn’t get the varnishing done until I got back from that trip yesterday, so this model really has only  just managed to qualify for Neglected Model May!