The back part of the barrel appeared to be correct in shape up until the fume extractor. As mentioned the front part of the barrel was skew, although the part placed in mild hot water could be "trained" back into shape, one could do some improvement. I opted for replacement as the main feature of a AFV is the barrel. The front part was cut off and the remaining part cleaned up. A new barrel was cut from aluminium tubing, with a tubing once size smaller forming the front protruding part. The circular shaped ring between the outer barrel and the protruding part was made with thin wire, with sg used to fill the gap where the wire bends around the barrel. The new barrel part was simply s.glued in place on the turret. Unfortunately the barrel is not positionable and can only be installed, what looks like max. elevation. The machine gun was made up from two sizes of syringe needles, placed in each other to resemble a machine gun barrel. No parts are supplied to make up the barrel of the machine gun, but this item is normally only installed under operational conditions. So you could model a Rooikat without it. Also no mirrors are carried under operational conditions.

Paint:

On to the painting stage. First Rooikat 76mm examples were painted in the normal SADF "Dark Earth" colour. But when the Rooikat 76mm entered service with the SADF, a new type of 3 tone camo was applied. However, the camo pattern is more expensive to maintain and since SA does not currently have a enemy with sophisticated aerial reconnaissance capabilities - all Rooikat AFV were repainted in the original "SADF Dark Earth" scheme. As far as I could establish no 105mm variants use the 3 tone pattern. The final remaining resin dust were cleaned from all the parts, followed by a good scrubbing with undiluted Windowlene. This is done to give the paint a better ‘bite' on the model. For resin parts I only use enamel paints, as they adhere better than acrylic. The complete model was arbrushed with a thin coat of flat black. Once dry, the areas that should remain flat black were masked off. This was followed by a mixture of Humbrol 29 "Dark Earth", lightened with "light Grey" for a bit of colour tuning. Humbrol 29 on its own is not the correct shade for SADF/SANDF armour. It is important to keep the coats very thin as a major error by modellers of resin armour kits is the thick coats of paint applied to the model. Another contributing factor to the thick paint is many modellers use ordinary household primer paint, which is way too thick. I have found primer not normally needed on resin kits, provided the model is well scrubbed down with a cleaning agent that contain ammonia and a enamel paint is used as the first coat. The thinner paint gives more definition to the small detail on the resin kit and does not look like a shell of colour added to the model. Once dry the fine detail was picked out by drybrushing with a lighter shade of the airbrush colour. Followed by the removal of the masking tape. A pencil was rubbed on a piece of sanding paper and the graphite added to the main barrel end and machine gun barrel, with the use of a ear bud. This resembles actual firing of the weapons.

Problematic wheels:

No wheels protrude beyond the body!

The wheels are a joy to airbrush as the hubs are separate. The hubs were painted in the same manner as the main components except using a slightly darker shade. The wheels were airbrushed with flat black followed by the weathering process. As I wanted to depict my model as a Rooikat on one of the firing ranges at Army Battle School, in the Northern Cape - a mix of Flat Earth, Dark brown and Dark yellow, was lightly airbrushed on the wheels, to resemble the reddish shade of the ground in the area. Once dry the hubs were attached to the wheels and the complete assembly glued onto the hull. As the hull and turret are fairly heavy I used epoxy to glue the wheels to the hull. All that remained were installation of the radio antennas using very thin wire.The base was airbrused with a similar shade as used on the wheels and the red flag made from tissue paper. 

In all a fairly enjoyable project which resulted, in a armour model for the collection, that is not the average main stream subject. Although, a bit disappointed by the example I received, I am sure it is probably a kind of worse case scenario that slipped through quality control. But this should not discourage one to build this kit as it is possible to build a decent model even from a below standard kit. Due to the engineering of the kit, it is viable to complete the project in a very short time.

Acknowledgement: 

• J. van Zyl for his valuable input.
• M. Cilliers for Rooikat brochures etc.
• Review example from Smalltalk Hobbies. Original article for "Smalltalk" journal of IPMS NC.
  

 Gallery - Opens in new Window. Registration required.