PL-01 - As good as done

I'm going to call this one done, for now.

What I mean by that is that I want to do some post-treatment with oils to give it a slightly more faded or dusty look. I'm hesitant to start this process and distracted by other builds and lack of time and motivation. Just a short hiatus.

The lighting effect is ... ok, but not 100% as I had envisioned it. From certain angles it's fine, from other angles it appears overdone. But I guess that's the whole idea of artificially adding a light effect? I dunno ...

PL-01 - Colour modulation

I promised I'd try a hand at colour modulation, because I found the all-grey, little-surface-detail PL-01 too bland.

There are several techniques and an insane amount of videos on this topic. Because the base-coat was already there, pre-shading wasn't an option, so I decided to go over certain spots with a lighter version of the base-coat and others with a darker. I guess this technically qualifies it as post-shading.
When it's all done, I will also try with oils to see how easy that would be to achieve the same result.

The trick here is to go very slow, with translucent layers, and build up an effect. That means highly thinning your paint before you spray. In the past I experienced issues with just thinning paint in a ratio of  e.g. 10:1 (10 parts thinner to 1 part paint), where it would either not spray properly from my airbrush, or too quickly or the paint would spider.

My reasoning was I though I remembered reading somewhere that if you thin paint TOO much, it loses whatever quality makes it stick to the surface and it becomes a loose gathering of floating pigments instead.

So I decided to try a few different products.

Glaze medium

Sounds like something you'd thin paint with, but it's clearly meant for brush-painting figures. It's super-fluid, finds all nooks and crannies and flows there. Stays wet very long.

→ Not good.

Varnish (satin)

In a ratio of roughly 5:1 (varnish:paint) this sprayed just like I expected. Could have gone thinner for even more control over the effect.

→ Acceptable

Transparator

A product by Ammo specifically for thinning paint beyond the point where it is no longer considered paint. It sprayed iffy. I'm also more inclined to put it in the brush-painting section.

→ Meh

At this point, I was no longer sure wether my spraying issues were product-related or airbrush-related, so I decided to give it a good strip & clean to be sure. There was a lot of dried paint and gunk in the body, which can't really improve it's functioning.

Airbrush thinner

As a last resort, I tried again with my default thinner. Stripping and cleaning the airbrush must have done something, because trigger control was flawless and because this thinner evaporates very fast, you can go over the same spot only seconds later. The airflow of the airbrush is enough to dry the surface.

→ OK!

So, I guess I'm back to the same old product, just learned to clean the airbrush better or more often and keep tight on the trigger-control.

Ah yes, the result!

I used a lighter tone around panel lines (where the angle changes), on flat top pannels, the top-left quadrant of the gun barrel and several oddly-angled surfaces. Darker tones around the turret ring and towards the lower part of the side skirts.

PL-01 - Sprue Goo to the rescue

You know how you learn from your past mistakes, the hard way so to speak, but after so many years of doing the same thing you learn to avoid those? Well, *I* don't, at least not where scale models are concerned.

I know you're supposed to fit twice, glue once. I know when dry-fitting the 2 halves of the turret around the gun it needed some force to close the gap. But still I went ahead thinking I could do it.

I closed the rear of the turret, glued it and let harden.
Then I closed the right side with a lot of force and clamps, glued it and let harden.
And then there was no way to close the left side, not even close to it. There was a gap of at least 2 millimeter. By pushing extremely hard, I could get them to touch, but no amount of clamps, tape, whatever could hold it in place. It was also very awkwardly located to put a vice on it.

In hindsight, I know exactly what I should have done. I should have made the holes where the gun fits in just a little bigger, but it was too late.
(I increased the contract in the photo to make it more easy to see)

So I decided to #fixThatShit and put putty in the gap, but my tube of Tamiya Basic Putty had almost dried up. I thinned it with TET (Tamiya Extra Thin cement) and got it back to a working state. I then slathered it copiously over the gap.

I like to put tape alongside the gap I'm trying to fill. I remove it after about an hour, when the putty has had some time to set, but has not yet hardened. The tape prevents too much plastic from being affected, removing it early prevents the putty breaking off as opposed to removing the tape too late.

When fully cured, I gently started sanding the putty into shape, but because of the turret design it needed to end in a point and the putty was just too soft or something. It sands away too easily.

I also found that thinning the putty with TET has eaten away where the plastic was at it's thinnest, making a bad situation even worse.

In the past, I have read about people making their own filler (mostly referred to as "Sprue Goo"), by dissolving left-over sprue in TET, making a gooey plastic mess. Because it's the same plastic as the kit, it bonds really well, hardens perfectly and sands just as well as a normal plastic part would.

I put some TET in an empty glass(!) bottle and added strips of white styrene I had left over. Becasue the strips where extremely thin (0.13mm or 0.005") they dissolved fully within mere hours, instead of the recommended 24 hours if you chuck in sprue pieces of 0.5 cm or bigger.

I applied my home-made filler with a toothpick. It was a bit too thick for use with a brush, but thick means it's easy to put a blob and count on it to stay in place (more or less).
In any case, you have control over the thickness by adding more TET or more styrene. When not too thick and applied sparingly or in multiple layers, it levels perfectly, which is an added bonus.

After about 16 hours, I tried gently sanding the plastic, but it was still a little malleable. It was after all a 3-4 mm blob, so needed more time to cure. After 24 hours extra, it was rock hard.
It was then easily sanded into shape and after priming and painting, I was very happy with the result.

In close-up, you still see some trace of it, but I'm calling it a success anyway.

PL-01 - A very bland basecoat

The PL-01 has received it's basecoat, which is basically also the final coat.

Because the result looks very bland, I want to go a step further. I've always struggled to avoid monochromaticity, although I find the word itself simply fascinating. It's worth 30 points in Scrabble, NOT counting any multipliers.
It's easier when you have some kind of camouflage scheme, but harder - I think - on a single-colour object, especially when it's a big flat surface.

My inspiration for colour modulation comes from Mig Jimenez. Not that he has the pattent on the technique, but he explains it nicely in this short how-to, even though I will only apply a variation of it. I also have a DVD where it is explained, but 10 years later, I'm sure there's a ton of similar stuff on Youtube now.

In the picture below, taken with simple daylight coming from the window behind, it is clear that panels 1, 2 and 3 appear to have a different shade of the base coat. I will be trying to artificially enhance this for a better result. Or make it worse, who knows.

I took the model outside for some exaggerated examples, so I can study which panels catch more of the sun's rays than others. Wish me luck!

PL-01 - Transparent parts

I like using liquid latex for masking weird shapes. Today, I masked the lenses and what-nots on the transparent pieces.

My go-to Humbrol Maskol hadn't been used in many years and the entire bottle had turned to rubber (go figure!). Buying Maskol online (or something resembling it) always costs you more shipping costs than the actual product is worth, but the local party shop also has liquid latex, albeit for a different application. The shop clerk was interested to see the result :-).

I have - in the mean time - replenished my Maskol supply from a model train store I just happened to pass in Aachen (Germany).

PL-01 - rubber parts

The PL-01 will be one big blob of the same colour. There are no pioneer tools or spare track-links on the outside, because it wants a low profile.
For some tonal variation, I painted the rubber part of the road-wheels and the rubber track-pads on all the tracks .... well, rubber, of course. (Vallejo Panzer Aces 306 - Dark rubber)

It's a tedious job, and the contrast with the base colour isn't very high. What's worse, most of it will be completely invisible under the sideskirts.

However, if I don't paint them, I'll always feel like something's missing.

PL-01 - Track assembly

Takom's PL-01 comes with link-and-length tracks, which I usually find annoying as hell. You need to glue them all together on top of the road-wheels, but then it becomes harder to properly paint the tracks and said road wheels separately.
If you paint everything in advance, glueing the individual links is next to impossible without compromising your paint job.

Takom was very nice to provide an assembly jig (the black track-shaped pieces on the picture below).
They double up as alignment-tool for the road-wheel arms (how considerate) AND assembly jig for the tracks. The plastic is of course made from something that will NOT react to the glue with which you are assembling the tracks.

PL-01 Polish concept tank

In Summer 2018, I learned about the existence of the PL-01, a Polish concept tank. It was announced at MSPO 2013 (International Defense Industry Exhibition in Poland).

As I am wont to do, I fell in love with the subject. I doubt it has much to do with my SO being Polish, but that may have played a role when a link to the article crossed my path.

The second picture - from a slightly elevated angle - captures best the sleak, almost futuristic design that caught my eye.

One of the more impressive features would be the infra-red, adaptive camouflage by BAE systems.

I can't find much news - in the 7 years since it's announcement - of it entering production. The concept remains little more than a mockup tank (I believe on top of a CV-90), but that doesn't change it's visual appeal to me.

Anyway, after the PL-01 showed up on my radar, I went looking for more information, particularly scale models but couldn't find any.
I had to wait another year (july 2019), when I learned Takom had tackled the subject and would be releasing it. I found a Polish webshop accepting pre-orders and off we were.

Delivery got delayed a few times, but in oktober it finally arrived.