Karl-Loki dio

After years of building wrecked, burnt out and rust bucket tanks with simple bases I thought I'd do something different, and bigger. After getting the Dragon Karl-Loki dirt cheap at a show I started getting ideas for a rusty old Loki sitting in old abandoned scrap/junk yard. But after looking at the kit and what details there were on most of the parts, especially the inner hull. I decided to get the Trumpeter kit that gives you two hull versions and also to guns, the 60cm and 54 cm mortors. The kit also comes with some inner hull parts.

My plan was to have the gun and cradle removed showing the inner hull details, and this means some scratch building. The base for this dio will be roughly 18"x24" and will have lots of junk on the base besides the Loki. I have set a deadline for this project and that is the middle of April 2012.

I am also blogging this build on my forum which can be found here at this link:
http://modelerssocialclub.proboards.com/index.cgi

Here is what has been done so far. I want the gun pulled out of the block so I added a liner to the block tube since this area is hollow if built OOTB.







The main parts to the cradle was also built, along with the barrel. This is just so I can get an idea of the size and layout of the base. The detail parts will be added later.



The hull

I started the hull work by cutting some liners out of .10 styrene sheet. This helps to cover all the sink marks eliminating the need for filler, and also allows me to do most of the scratch work, marking bolt locations and later the painting. All the white parts are not glued in the hull.

The almost two hundred nuts and bolts are from Tichy Train and come in very handy for this type of detailing. There are some torsion bars mounts and a partial floor included in the kit but not enough for the entire hull, including the motor compartment. I used two of these mounts (?) as masters and sent them to Steve Reid of Celticwerks to have 14 cast in resin. It didn't take him long and in one week I ten had enough for the hull including the kit parts.

Here is where the model stands at the moment. There will be much more to do in the hull until it's ready for paint.






The torsion bars, floor details and all the nuts and bolts.







Just to show how big this vehicle was, here is a comparison with a Grille 38t that I am working on