Heavy mortar goes pew pew
Added 2022-12-21 22:42:28 +0000 UTCMy friends, the main character of this anime is ready to blow! Holding the individual components, such as the mortar, or the cradle underneath, in your hand lets you really appreciate the term "super heavy mortar". Especially when we consider how a 1/35 scale Toyota Land Cruiser would pretty much fit into the cradle!
Now, I'm seriously impressed by how accurate and detailed this model is. And we're talking about a kit from 2003 and the early days of Trumpeter! The mortar actually goes together just like the real thing. The barrel with the massive breech, the main body, and the recoil housing. Unfortunately, the old technology didn't allow for too much slide-molding, and parts that would nowadays be made from a single piece are glued together from individual "walls". This leads to TONS of filling and sanding. Luckily, the entire mortar body was cast iron with pretty heavy texture, and the stippled putty can hide lots of imperfections! One extreme example is the toothy clockwork thingy at the bottom, you have to fill a visible gap running right down the middle of each tooth because the main mortar body is glued from two halves.
The cradle is very similar. Extremely detailed but the parts are crude. Lots of heavy flash, large rectangular ejector marks, gluing things from multiple pieces, then having to fill and sand the visible joints, and texturing. Some areas are quite tricky to sand, such as the visible joints at the front and back of the cradle. I'm just getting to the sanding part there, and it seems like I'll have to replace a few rivets.
Well, I need to finish the cradle and then build the loading mechanism!
PS: this kit has insatiable hunger for cement and putty. I'm guessing it'll gobble up an entire bottle of Mr Cement S and good 2/3 of a new tube of Tamiya putty.
