Blockade Buster - Grav Tank: Part 1

 Blockade Buster Conversion

1 Blockade Buster

1 piece heavy plasticard

1 stir stick

2 part putty

Small washers

Misc other bits

Super glue

1 X-acto knife

1 drill

Matchbox toys are quite often pretty close in scale to 15mm and they make some cool models at this size if you can find them.  I am a fan of their Stryker model for instance, but can't find more than the one I bought originally.  They do however have a very inexpensive and simple IFV/AA type vehicle.  The Blockade Buster.  It runs at about the $1 mark depending where you are.  I get mine for $1.34 CAD from Walmart.

The parts of the blockade buster.

The vehicle has a plastic turret, metal upper body and plastic lower body.  It is held together with rivets, so to start this conversion the first step is to drill out the rivets and disassemble the model.
This leaves us with the tanks components.  You will notice that the upper metal body does not include the back.  The metal body is open at the back.  It will need to be sealed to make a new vehicle.

Back of the lower body has the entire back of the vehicle

We can either take what we need from the plastic body or make something new.  I opted to remove from the plastic body and glue into place.

Back panel cut free to close the back of the metal tank body

And glued into the main tank body

Here you can see the wood added to the back of the tank to even up the edges (and back)

Once this is done it well become apparent that the metal body needs to be evened out as it is not level all the way back.  I used small pieces of wood stir sticks to accomplish this.

Bottom view with axle mounts, wooden body and rivets

 I used the metal wheel axles in my design but he metal rivets proved to be in the way.  I had to cut these off flush with the base of the tank.










Once I had this completed I took a heavy piece of plasticard and drilled holes to make slots that I could pass the wheel mounts through.  I then used a 2 part putty to add a grave plate mounting bracket.  Basically a long rectangle with a 45 degree cut. along it's length.

Once at this stage I also used putty to try and seal the major gaps.  Once it cured I went in with sand paper to try and smooth out and reshape some areas.

The grav rails are some more heavy plasticard glued to the underside mounting plates.  Once they were glued in place I added some small washers for detail and gave everything a quick prime to see how it looked.

 Moving forward in the next part I will address how I will add the turret and get the model to a pre-painted stage.