1 - Prepping Osario

I gave the first vehicle a good examination, to see what I should do before setting up an "assembly line" to handle all of the vehicles (the manufacturer had provided me with twenty-five Osario 4000's!). First, I found that I needed to make a swipe of my file at the rear (central and both corners) on the hull, to remove excess bits of metal (minor). The front edge of the hull wasn't always straight, so I needed to check this and use file if necessary; also, the front left edge sometimes needed a bit of excess metal knocked off (again, minor).

The front right corner of the hull was more of a problem. I found that it was flawed on all of my samples, having a nick in the corner, some nicks in the underside, and that the underside slope had two planes when I thought it should slope in a single plane. I didn't think the underside problems were worth sweating over - how often would anyone see the bottom of the tank? - but the nicked corner bothered me enough to do something about.

My solution was to file the corner to remove the nick, then file the underside to slope appropriately to the new corner. This turned out to be quite easy, though the results weren't perfectly consistent on all vehicles when I was done with them. (But, I figured the variations were hardly noticeable, but the nicked edge had been to me.)

I discovered one other problem with the hull when I "test fitted" the turret to the hull. The location of the hull "hatch" interfered with the placement of the turret, leaving the turret riding so high that you could see under it. This bothered me enough that I took a hobby knife and trimmed the hatches off my hulls. Happily, this proved easy to do - the knife removed most of the hatch, and a little file work smoothed out the hull top.

As for the turret, there were minor nubs at the rear corners which needed to be knocked off, and a minor seam along the turret sides and main barrel which was easily filed off. At first, I thought the gun barrels were molded in one piece, but I found they were indeed separate. I used the tip of a hobby knife to separate the barrels, and used a file to knock off tiny nubs at the ends of the barrels. Filework also removed a rough spot in the top of the main barrel. Lastly, all of my main barrels pointed slightly to the left, so I braced the turret side against my tabletop and gently bent the barrel until I liked the direction.

Having established what I needed to do, I started prepping all of my tank fleet. My particular method was to pop open a pack (5 tanks), do all the hulls, then all the turrets, then open the next pack. When I was all done, I looked at everything, decided I could do a better job on the front right corners, and touched everything up one more time.

Then I washed the parts in warm soapy water to remove any residue and prepare them for painting.