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A lot of Soviet tanks - especially the WWII ones have prominent raised weld seams. Her's a quick and easy way to replicate butt welds and inside corner welds |
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Many tanks are built with what's called welded construction - unless they're rivited or bolted together. A lot of the welds are ground down and then polished before being painted, or covered by additional armour. The T-34 seems to have more long and visible welds that it's fair share. For simple butt welds - that is two pieces of metal put edge to edge and molten metal squirted on, or for inside angle joints - like joining mudguards to the body there's an easy way. I'm using the T-34 Model 1945 turret as it's got a beauty of a weld, running all the way round - the turret was sand cast in two pieces, then brought together. It was welded, then only if there was time, it was ground down before being painted... |
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| Stretched sprue is the best material to replicate welds with - it's certainly the cheapest anyway - and has two big advantages: the first is it can be made with the sort of tools and materials you already have around the house. The second is that it makes use of what would otherwise be a waste product that your hard earned hobby pennies have been spent on! |
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If you've never done it you'll need a candle and a length of the left over sprue that holds the bits you want. Gently warming the sprue will make it soften, at the right moment you can lift the sprue clear, and draw it out to a suitable length. Make certain the sprue doesn't burn as it's not good stuff to inhale. Practice will show you just how warm the plastic needs to be and how hard and how fast you need to pull to draw out your thread. But it soon becomes easy and it can be used for a number of things in modelling, including aerials, coils of rope and electrical wiring amongst other things. |
| You probably can't see it here, but believe me I've cut a groove in this piece of plasticard with my scriber... |  |
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Press
the sprue into the groove, then brush a bit of Liquid Poly over it. As the
plastic softens it can be chopped into short lengths with the point of a
craft knife. Another brush with Liquid Poly will shape the sprue into blobs
that match the congealed, hardened metal.
Once the Liquid Poly has dried out thoroughly, it can be either left, or lightly sanded to flatten it, and replicate the real life grinding that often took place. |
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The curves in this T-34 Model 1945 turret are best tackled as a series of shorter lengths. Remember that the welds here were blodged on in a hurry by unskilled labour - so they weren't neat and pretty. Allied welds were often much neater; German policy was to grind the weld and polish it - often in the pre war period they were ground on both sides of the plate if it was accessible. One method to distinguish when a T-34 was built is to see how much work was done on the weld post production - the more grinding, the later the production date is likely to be. |
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| This part of the turret weld is not as well ground down as other parts - proof that it was very hit and miss. | The quality of the welding on the MG housing here is very much post war quality |
