01/09/2012
The Humvee is done. I ended up trimming the ballancing tubes underneath NSVT to place the gun in horizontal position. Now the vehicle will have to wait until the spring airbrushing season to get some dirt on.
9/25/2011
Painted the vehicle today. I'm not very good at it but I'm happy with the results. A couple weeks ago I finished the last few details - clamps that hold the (presumed) antenna both vertically and horizontally. Antenna is a styrene rod and the cloth cover is a tissue soaked in thinned white glue. Made the NSVT mount out of copper and reshape foam. Found a neat way to make the glass cover for the search light - essentially punched it out of sheet of clear plastic with a tube that happened to be the right diameter. Someone with more patience could have also made the glass lense-shaped but I'm fine with just flat.
Making KFOR marking was a challenge - I knew that the stencil wouldn't work on the door because of the proximity to the hinges so I made a 'reversed' stencil. I painted the areas for the marking with Tamiya white glossy acrylic. Then I printed the letters on clear (not paper!) Avery shipping labels, cut the letters out and transferred them on the prepainted areas using masking tape. Then I painted the whole vehicle NATO green and camouflaged with NATO brown and black. I peeled off the 'stencils' almost immediately and only a couple letters gave me trouble - some of the white paint chipped off with the label. But otherwise I could;t be happier with the results - the marking looks simple gorgeous!
All that is left is to finish the machine gun and weather the vehicle.
8/9/2011
Over the last few months I finally managed to glue the armored shell in place. The tricky part is that there seems to be "double windshield" - one inside that actually holds the glass windows and the one outside with shutters attached on top. I had to plan this step carefully and pre-paint some part I knew I wouldn't have access to and mask the windows.
- I glued a little 'gutter' around the doors and simulated the welding seam with a soldering iron - have to give it a coat of paint to see how ugly it is and probably smooth things out a little.
- made the searchlight out of renshape by turning my dremel tool into a lathe. came out pretty good but the surface might be too crude and require a few coats of paint to fill the pores.
- antenna mounts too quite some time and I couldn't be prouder and happier by how they came out. Guitar strings will serve as antennas.
- NSVT from 'Tank' is unfortunately designed to be in slightly elevated position (as an anti-aircraft weapon should be) but I want the gun to be horizontal. I'm trying to figure out if it's worth it as it seems to be a lot of work. Underbelly of the gun was rather crudely done and again I used a piece of guitar string to simulate the spring. If I leave the gun in elevated position the underbelly will show.

4/17/2011

I got my hands on two different resin kits of NSVT machine gun that is mounted on Ukrainian HMMWVs in Kosovo. I decided to spend time and do a little side by side comparison and visual review of the kits. One is from French company "Blast Models" ($12) and the other one is from Russian "Tank" ($8). Both kits offer great detail as far as the machine gun itself goes. The main differences are mostly in the gun mount. Surprise was the huge difference in size of the ammunition cans. Blast kit seems to require more clean-up and unfortunately the gun barrel was bent.

2/2/2011

Added pictures of the spare carrier. I'm extremely proud of this part as there was a lot of planning involved. It's all made out of various brass tubes and soldered together. Special thanks go to Brent Sauer for kindly donating the spare tire. The gunner's hatch also involved a lot of planning and took some time to put together. I painted it to help reveal any seam imperfections. As for the armorde windshield - I'm not quite sure I got it right but it looks close enough.

12/31/2010

This is something I wanted to build for a long time now. Being Ukrainian American I think it is only natural for me to make a model of an iconic American vehicle serving with Ukrainian peacemakers in Kosovo. The armored shell looks like a tribute to classical looking vehicles like Quad Gun tractor and Soviet BTR-152K. Here are some of the pictures of the original vehicle.
As a base I used Tamiya TOW missile HMMWV kit, which I gave my nephew for Christmas years ago. He started building it but quickly gave up. I hope I don't stop at this point. It took me some time to draw up the shape of the armored shell and then gluing the styrene pieces together was another challenge. I'm not using any aftermarket accessories but I might have to try and get my hands on NSV-T resin kit from TANK. So all the additions are made out of styrene and copper.
If you have any questions regarding this project or anything else on this site feel free to contact me via email " mokeyev'at'yahoo.com " (just replace 'at' with @)

 

russian interpreter in Chicago

Conference Translation Interpreters Equipment

Chicago Washington Los Angeles Russian Spanish Japanese Chinese German French Portuguese Italian translator interpreter headsets simultaneous interpretation equipment

choose your flavor >