Following the publication of the last chapter (Step 1) I became aware of two mistakes I naively made during the construction of the road wheel bogeys and the idler wheel units.
A good friend has, since my last post, lent me Tankograd's excellent M8 HMC Technical Manual. While I think they may be a bit too much (in terms of "rivet counting" and information overload) for beginners, I highly recommend these publications to modellers taking their hobby a bit more seriously. While looking through the book I noted that the bogey is mounted to the lower hull with four bolts. The Tamiya instructions, seen in the Step 1 chapter, incorrectly instruct modellers to remove the top two bolts, leaving only the lower two!
So, if you are intending to build this kit: do not remove the top two bolt heads from the bogey front plates! If, however, you naively removed the bolts, here is how I fixed this mistake.
The first thing I did was establish how big the bolts would be. I did this by measuring the remaining bolt heads using my callipers. As I do not own digital callipers, I had to "guestimate" the sub-1mm size. I did this by visually comparing a 0.5mm and 0.8mm plastic rod to the bolt. The 0.5mm was the better match.
Once the bolt head size had been established, I proceeded to cut several 1mm lengths from the aforementioned 0.5mm styrene hex rod. Since I would need bolt heads for later chapters, I proceeded to cut in the region of forty bolt heads. Two bolt heads were then glued into place on each bogey, and then sanded down to a similar height as those moulded to the kit part.
Above you see one of the corrected bogeys.
The next correction of Step 1 is with regards to the location of the PE part on the idler gear housing or unit. You may have noticed that I placed it in a sort of mid-point on the front facing part of the arm. This, per the Eduard instructions I might add, is incorrect! As James McFarlane (and my thanks to James) on Armorama pointed out, and verified in the Tankograd book, the PE part and its accompanying plastic card spacer should be placed at the top of the curved part of the idler gear housing.
The first thing I needed to do was remove the misplaced plastic spacer from the kit part. This was easily done using my hobby knife fitted with a chisel blade. While I could have simply reused the part, I decided to cut two new plastic card circles, and so also removed the PE part from the old spacer.
Next came cutting a new circle. I decided to do this differently to my original method. Perhaps this method I am about to explain is the correct way, but the other method worked just as well.
Using a circle stencil, simply bought from a stationery store, I used a scribing tool to score the circle in the plastic card. I made the circle slightly bigger than required to allow for waste and mis-cuts.
To cut the circle one simply keeps going around and around, using the scribing tool, until one has cut all the way through the plastic card.
Once the spacer circles had been created, the PE part was glued to the centre of the circle, and the excess plastic sanded smooth until the two parts were aligned. This was then glued to the kit part, and Tamiya filler putty used to fill any remaining gaps. The putty was sanded smooth once cured.
Above are the two corrected idler assemblies.
The next chapter, Step 2, deals with the drive sprocket.
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