M7 Priest

Dan M
Finally managed to start painting this kit. Some olive drab basecoat and some color modulation, first time i tried using 4 colors for this. Have to admit, after a fresh coat of paint the model starts to look better despite his age (and faults).

Dan M
Went ahead with painting the rest of the details by hand brush (rubbers, tools, control panel dials, rifles, etc).

Fabian D.
Nice work with cleaning up your "old mess"😉
Can you comment on the quality of the kit?

Dan M
Thank you Fabian and James!

@Fabian: the kit is a mixed bag. It's an old kit of mine and at the time it was miles ahead of the old Italeri, but then Dragon came up with much better kits 🙂. As far as accuracy is concerned, looking at older pictures it seems it's a mix of early production parts with some intermediate version. Not really sure if such a version really existed or not so can't comment further on that. The fit is mostly good but the main problem with the kit is the huge amount of sink marks that are in really visible areas (some are on the gun itself!). I've seen better vinyl tracks but for it's time they were good. Some of the details are really good (like the weld lines), others are very soft or too thick (especially on the gun) or non-existent (like the bogie cast numbers and i'm mentioning this as the Academy M3 kit has them). The headlight guards are very thick (guess they didn't do PE at the time 🙂 which was ok for me as back then I was also really bad with PE ).

Fabian D.
Thanks for the info. I´ll ceep that in mid if I feel the urge to build a Priest.

Ingo F
Oh missed that one. Looks great so far. Love the interior detail and tools painting.

Dan M
Thank you Ingo!

Dan M
Added the decals, with a coat of gloss varnish underneath. Next step, a coat of satin varnish over the entire vehicle and then the weathering process can begin.

Dan M
Managed to work on the weathering. Played a little with AK washes and streaking grime, some pigments and then I decided to try out the new Vallejo weathering products (thick mud, splash mud, oil and fuel stains). It quickly became one giant experiment for my range of weathering products 🙂. Not sure if I can add anything else so I'll probably call it done.

Dan M
Thank you James. I will probably add some more dust pigments on top of the hull, looks too clean compared with the rest 🙂