The Little World

And I did not think I would find one in this Zvezda kit. One of the mufflers is missing.

The plastic stock box yielded a bit of Evergreen tube and its end was sealed with Milliput. Simple.

Every other blessed part fit perfectly – and spending a day making the bogies was a real pleasure. I’ve written before about the philosophy of making every part of a model a model in itself – it means you are succeeding every time you sit at the bench. Taking little rewards as well as the major one at the end is very sweet.

Not so sweet was the track work. I followed the instructions about the sequence of the track segments, but found that the logical thing to do was quite different. So there was a little ungluing and re-gluing needed. Fortunately I had chosen PVA as the adhesive between road wheels and track and a half hour’s soaking in a pan of water released the parts with no damage whatsoever.

The logical thing about these tracks is that they really start to function when the individual links are engaged in the front sprockets…and all the rest of the track segments should follow on in sequence as they are being drawn forward. One this was re-done, the rest fell into place with no gaps.

Note that Zvezda did provide plates to occlude the underside of the hull, but you applied them after the tracks went on and the hull dropped into place.