The Extratech Beaverette Mk III is a resin + PE kit. Unlike the Firing Line Beaverette (1/76), the Extratech is 1/72. As we’ll see later, this didn’t really matter when placed side-by-side with the rest of the Beaverette brood.
Here’s a quick look at the parts (there were even decals, something no other kit provided):
After cutting the parts from the resin pour blocks, everything got washed.
I had to punch out some spacers to fit in the wheels so the axle would fit properly
For this scale, the chassis has decent detail. The Firing Line Beaverette had nothing. A little wheel painting and test fitting/gluing using a jig completed the chassis.
The turret was exasperating as the cylinder segment was two separate PE parts. One, when rolled, was about 270 degrees, the other was about 90 degrees of the circle. These had to be joined up to fit inside an inset on the hull top. You can see me using a dowel to try and press the rolled PE into place.
From the front, with the turret top on, it doesn’t look too bad. But from the rear, the fit was awful and self-inflicted as I obviously hadn’t perfectly rolled out the two partial cylinders. Much filler and sanding ensued. At this point in the model building, I realized that the cheap construction of the real world Beaverettes was being mirrored by my own efforts.
The only other really tricky bit on the Extratech were the twin PE Vickers machine guns which I attempted to solder together. The joints are extremely small and needless to say, with a bit of handling, they broke. I put this aside until after painting when I would have the turret gun mount to assist in the gluing.
I’ll cover painting and decals in a later post
Cropredy Beaverette Project 