Moving right along, I started on the main front armor panel. To start off, I did a thin cardboard mock-up of the front panel. I just used part of a Quaker Oats Snack Bar box.
Mock Up – Front Armor Panel with Top Assault Doorhttp://images.dogmaraiderville.net/d/1387-3/mockup-frontarmorpanelwithtopassaultdoor-2008-11-30.pngIn the picture above moving left to right the widths of the first plastic piece are 26.5 mm, the first cardboard piece is 11 mm, the next plastic piece is 26 mm and the final cardboard piece is 10.5 mm. This configuration maintains the 74 mm total width of the engine piece that we manufacturer earlier and keeps the LRE square on all four corners. This is very important as being off on any of the measurements means your LRE central core is going to be crooked causing more headaches than it already is!
You can use the configuration above to create your main front armor panel without any problems. However as with any design, before I started cutting my first piece of plasticard, I changed my design. One of the main considerations was having both optical hoods (for lack of a better name) on either side of the armor piece. If you look at a regular Land Raider, the optical hood that I'm talking about if found on the left side of the main front armor panel.
Now I have two different types of these optical hoods. The first type is the standard one found on the front of the Land Raider now. The second one is the more detailed one that exists on the front armor panel of the Prometheus Land Raider Kit from Forgeworld. I love the extra detail on things and have decided to put two of these optical hoods on my LRE. Each optical hood will flank the main front armor panel on either side with the turret cut-out offset to the right (when looking at the panel from the front) and perhaps one other small piece of detail to the left of the turret cut-out. This modification required me to change the widths of the plasticard fill-in pieces to 8 mm and 13.5 mm respectively with the larger of the pieces being placed to the right.
This configuration will cause some problems with the hinge positions so I'll have to cut out and move those as need but it shouldn't be too much extra work. To start off, I cut out and replaced the hinge cover closest to the turret cut-out with plasticard. I preserved the hinge cover as I'll be using it later.
Right Front Armor Panel – Hinge Cover Cut Outhttp://images.dogmaraiderville.net/d/1397-3/rightfrontarmorpanel-hingecovercutout-2008-11-30.pngMoving right along, the next step was to add the right most plasticard piece to supplement the width of the armor. Initially this piece was supposed to be 10.5 mm wide however with the added optical hood detail item I had to increase the width to 13.5 mm. I started off by gluing small plasticard straps which work as backing pieces to support the plasticard front.
After measuring the thickness of the plastic front armor plate provided by GW, I found that its not precisely 1.0 mm wide but instead around 1.25 mm. As 1.25 mm plasticard is virtually non-existent from what I found, I instead added an addition 0.25 x 2.00 mm plasticard strip to the backing straps which boost the armor level flush with the GW plastic.
Right Front Armor Panel – Build Uphttp://images.dogmaraiderville.net/d/1396-3/rightfrontarmorpanel-buildup-2008-11-30.pngNow the picture above shows that the front hinge is still present. Unfortunately during the gluing process I glued the assembly I was building to the wrong front armor plate. You'll remember I have two of them as I'm building the LRE with two LR kits. After taking the picture and realizing my error, I gently ripped the piece off and glued it to the correct one. I have to learn to keep these extraneous parts out of the way while I'm working.
Put the right piece of the main front armor panel to allow the glue to dry, I then moved on to the left side piece. Now here we have to first cut out the front optical hood detail item. As I want to look like the one on the Prometheus front panel, I need to make some minor additions and modifications in plasticard for both to look the same.
Left Front Armor Panel – Optical Hood Removal and New Panel Backinghttps://images.dogmaraiderville.net/d/1386-3/leftfrontarmorpanel-opticalhoodremovalandnewpanelbacking-2008-11-30.pngTo cut the optical hood out of that piece, I carefully measured, marked and then gently scored and cut the piece out with a combination of Xacto and razor saw work. The end result was a very clean polished cut with minimal damage to both pieces. After removing the optical hood, I went right back to work again putting in backing straps and 0.25 mm spacers for the eventual addition of a plasticard front piece to fill the gap.
Tomorrow I'll go into detail as to creating the remaining pieces for the front main armor panel, creating a Prometheus-style optical hood (btw if any one has a better name for whatever that is, please let me know... it kinda sounds funny), and setting up the locations for the hinges for the top front assault door.
As always questions and comments are welcome!