My friends, tonight we’ll build and paint
the first kit from AK: a Toyota Land Cruiser technical. Although it has the number 02 on
the box, it’s the first model they released. It has everything you’d expect from a modern kit,
and what really stands out to me is the beautiful box art made by Felipe Rodna who’s been crushing
it with illustrations for other box art and for books as well, especially the Panzerwrecks series.
Anyway, the box isn’t completely loaded with sprues – it’s a small model, after all, but what
I really appreciate are the instructions.
Clear, easy to navigate, with paint call-outs for each
part, cutting templates for window masks, and, of course, color profiles for different
vehicles. Just like with every kit where I don’t know what to do, I’ll start with
step 1 – wheels. And the kit gives us two options – off-road and more universal tires. Of
course, I’ll go with the more aggressive ones. Interestingly, most modeling and detailing can be
probably done on these… they’re assembled from two halves, so there’s the obligatory sanding
of the resulting seam line in the middle, but also, the tire says CONTINENTAU… but a bit
of scraping with a hobby blade takes care of that. I’m sure everyone who built a Dragon Stug
or Panzer III knows this trick pretty well. The rims are glued afterward, and there’s another
detail worth improving. Adding the air valves will make them look way more authentic, and it’s
a very simple addition. It’s just a 0.5mm wire bent at 90 degrees, held in place with super glue.
Much better than an empty hole in the rim, right? Next up is the exhaust, where I drilled out the
pipe using a sharp, fresh hobby blade.
You’d think I wouldn’t find any use for stippled putty
on a car model, right? Well, some subtle texture on the exhaust won’t hurt anyone, even though most
of it will be hidden. That applies to those tires as well. It’s gonna fill the seam lines, and
it’ll give them a more worn-down, rubbery look. The kit also gives us 3 options for
the front axle – steered left, right, or straight. Each option uses a separate
part, and I went with the “steered right” option.
The rest of the chassis was
built according to the instructions with no improvements necessary, I just
stippled some more texture on the frame. Moving up, there’s a foldable windshield, but
I didn’t use it because it’s often missing on technicals. There are quite a lot of large,
but shallow, ejector pin marks on the floor and inner walls. Luckily, most of them can be
removed by carefully scraping the surface. This is actually a very neat trick and I didn’t have
to use it as much on my previous models. A curved hobby blade is ideal for those tight spaces, and
the scraped area can be easily blended in with a fiberglass pencil. I think this trick will
come in handy for aircraft modelers as well.
Now, I wanted to keep the chassis and the
upper body as separate sub-assemblies, but the fit was very tight and I didn’t
wanna run into some problems later, so I decided to glue them together…
just to be on the safe side. All of this is otherwise pretty straightforward,
and once again, I just followed the instructions as there was nothing to modify. They let you
decide if you wanna keep the tailgate open or closed, but for some reason, I had a small
problem here.
This is probably my own mistake, but the gaps around the tailgate are just way too
large. However, I didn’t notice this problem on other models that I’ve seen finished on the
internet, so it was probably my own oopsie. I wasn’t quite happy with some of the
panel lines on the front end either, as they would lead to quite inconsistent results
during the pinwashing stage. To rectify this, I used Tamiya putty diluted with lacquer thinner
and applied it as a wash. I used this method a few times already, although so far I’ve been using Mr.
Surfacer 500. Tamiya putty is more durable, and when you use lacquer thinner, it won’t bite into
the surface, so you can easily wipe off the excess with a clean brush and more lacquer thinner.
People were telling me about this trick a lot in the past, and I was always like “yeah, whatever”,
and I was seriously missing out. It’s an awesome method, once again usable with airplanes and
other types of models as well.
You might need to apply several layers depending on how deep
the gaps are, but the results are really good. The DShK machine gun is quite detailed, but
it’s a prime candidate for an aftermarket replacement. I didn’t want to go the
extra mile on this one as I’m not very excited about technical trucks, so I went
for a full out-of-the-box type of build. So that’s what we get with the basic kit. They
give us a few wooden crates and some spare ammo cans for the machine gun, but I decided to add
slightly more stowage.
Something along these lines. There are the wooden boxes from the kit,
my own 3D-printed ammo cans which are available on my Patreon for anyone interested, and a bunch
of resin stowage from Plusmodel and Eureka XXL. I just had to integrate it into the model with
tarps sculpted from epoxy putty. Green Stuff is my favorite material for this because you can roll
it extremely, we’re talking like paper-thin. All you need is a lot of baby powder and something
smooth like an old battery. Once you got it as thin as possible, its flexible properties will
begin to shine because… it’s hard to describe, but it’s almost as if the putty is folding itself.
It behaves like real cloth, that’s what I’m trying to say. When I’m integrating the stowage, I
always start with a basic layout, and then I add the individual pieces one by one, most of the time
gluing them firmly in place and wrapping some kind of tarp around them.
This even allowed me to hide
the ill-fitting tailgate, thanks to a large tarp from Eureka XXL. Once I have everything in place,
I gently wipe the stowage and putty with tap water. This will make everything nice and smooth
while also removing any remnants of baby powder. I also placed a bunch of plastic jerry cans at the
front, tying them in place with a lead strip. It’s harder than one might think, especially because
the lead strip tends to tear apart rather quickly. Anyway, there wasn’t really much to show from the
construction process except a few modifications, so I decided to give it a quick layer
of paint. I’ll apply the base colors for the vehicle itself, and everything else
will be finished in the next episode, okay? So the black primer gives us
a very nice shadowy base coat, while also letting us appreciate
all those different textures. For the main body color, I chose blue from the box
art. It’s a very nice change compared to military green tanks and 50 shades of olive drab. Blue is
also a very fun paint to post-shade and weather with all kinds of effects, as you can shift
it in multiple directions.
For post-shading, I used deck tan and white, making the
paint lighter and lighter. There’s a lot of color variation with these civilian
trucks, and from the photos I’ve found, you can fade the color to almost pure white.
My Fengda BD-130 airbrush was starting to show severe signs of wear and tear during this job,
so I might get a new one. This is the advantage of cheap airbrushes – instead of buying
new spare parts, you can just get a brand new one, and it’ll cost you less than spare
needles or nozzles for a high-end airbrush. So this is the basic paint job with some quick
highlights and fading on the most exposed areas. As I was looking at reference pictures, I
found a few more interesting effects. For example these stains of moisture, or more likely,
grime and oil, turning the faded paint darker, and the opposite, almost pure white around
chipping effects and corroded areas. Plenty of things to play around with! I quickly added
the grimy stains using Tamiya clear blue. It’s quite similar to Ammo Shaders, although a bit
more intense, but you can always make Tamiya clear paints more translucent by adding clear
varnish.
The more you add, the more translucent they’ll become. And, of course, how much
you thin it down plays a huge role as well. Okay, that’ll do for the main
body color. To be honest, I wasn’t very thrilled about this
subject when I was building it, but the creative freedom I had with the
post-shading method was totally worth it! The chassis seems to be THE place for
rust – on all the pictures I found, the lower portions were always heavily corroded
or showing lots of heavy paint chipping. Because I’m just base-coating everything at this stage,
I decided to lay down the basic worn finish. That means spraying the chassis in various
rust tones which I mixed from Tamiya Hull Red and Flat Yellow, making the paint lighter
in 3 different layers. And once that was done, I sprayed remnants of the black color,
focusing it toward the middle of each surface while keeping the worn edges
rusty. As I said, it’s just a base coat, and a foundation for more refined effects,
which I’ll do in the next episode.
Wheels were quickly base-coated as well, and
here I used the black primer as the bottom layer, making it lighter towards the outer diameter of
the wheel by mixing Tamiya Flat Black and Buff. And I even managed to airbrush the ammo canisters
and the mounting pole for the machine gun. These were painted with Russian 4BO from MRP, and
highlighted by adding Tamiya Yellow Green. Alright, my friends, that will have to do for
this episode. AK Interactive sent me this model a while ago… they started by sending me an
e-mail asking if I’d be interested in this, and without waiting for my reply, they sent the
model on the same day… but I’d most likely say yes anyway because the VW Beetle I built
during the summer was a lot of fun. This required more work than the Beetle because the
car is intact, and carries a lot of stowage, but I think the detail painting and weathering
will be awesome and highly enjoyable. I’ll continue in the next video by outlining all the
details with a pin wash, then I’ll probably add some chipping effects, and what I’m looking
forward to the most is the stowage.
What I’m not very stoked about is painting the seats,
but maybe it’ll be an easy job, we’ll see. In the meantime, I want to say thank you for
watching, my friends, and thank you to my awesome Patrons who make this show possible. If
you like what I’m doing, wanna get more of it, and in return support my work, you can go to my
Patreon page and see what kind of reward would you like.
I’m posting there almost every day with
updates from my workbench, we can get in touch through DMs, comments, and e-mails, I’m posting
one week early ad-free videos, so you could watch me finish this model right now, I also have
some small 3D models for detailing your projects, including the DShK ammo canisters I used for
this model, a bunch of references from the real world if you need inspiration for old buildings,
landscapes, and so on, and these beautiful studio photos which you can download in full resolution!
Alright, my dear friends, this is another one of those small, quick projects where my main
goal is to keep it simple and fun. I plan on making a small scenic base for it with
two figures, and it should all be done right before Christmas. And then, in January, I’ll be
back in full force with a huge, complex model, but that’s a story for another time. I’m gonna go
and finish this one, and you all stay safe, stay awesome, build those models, don’t just collect
them, and I’ll see you in the next one, cheers!
