5P85S S-300 (SA-10B Grumble-B) Missile TEL - Part 1

As promised back in this post - following my purchase and completeion of the "Flap Lid" Radar TEL I decided to buy a Missile TEL as well.

So I went back to the previous ebay seller and picked up this:

 This time - rather than being tricky and painting it all seperately and then finding it no longer fitted together, I decided to glue together all the various main sections and then paint them.

This is a photo of the various sections glued together:

As you can see you get a fair amount of stuff in the box - including 4 missiles - which you will never see as they are inside the missile tubes.  I didn't glue all the missile tubes to the erector arm so I could paint them more easily.  Whilst trying to work out what was what I had a bit of a look here on the AusAirpower website and discovered a little bit more about the Grumble B.

First up - there are 2 different types of Missile TELs.  A master or "smart" TEL called the 5P85S which looks like this:

You'll note it is easily recognisable by the large compartment immediately behind the drivers cabin.

The other variant is the 5P85D - which is a "dumb" TEL and it looks like this:

You'll not the compartment behind the driver cabin is open here.  Both of these photos have been used without the permission of the excellent (as I keep saying) AusAirpower website.

At that point I decided to build the "smart" TEL.

Further study on the Aus Airpower site lead me to this diagram:

Which shows how a whole battery of SA-10B's operates.  Somewhat to my dismay it also shows the missile TELs operate in groups of three - 1 "smart" TEL and 2 "dumb" TELs operating close together.

So... what to do.  The whole idea behind buying these kits - apart from a bit of cheap fun - was to use them as a target of a NATO SpecOps force.  Now it looks like I need 2 more!!!  Not sure what to do about that... I might just keep the one missile TEL as a proxy for the three - or I might get two more.  I think the best thing to do is to carry out a trial game of Black Ops with a command vehicle, radar TEL and missile TEL and see how that goes - then try another game with 3 missile TELs and the two other vehicles and see how that goes.

Anyway... back to painting the TEL.  To further avoid the mistakes I made last time, I put a little blob of blu-tack on the spots that would be major gluing points - or where two parts would need to fit together.

I then undercoated it all in black and then sprayed a basecoat of Russian Green.  Next step was to carefully black-line the whole vehicle.

It's now ready to be finished.

More on that next.

Thanks

Richard