Tamiya 1/48 Panzer III Ausf.L Part 1

 

One of the real workhorses of the earlier half of the war, nearly 6000 built over 12 different variants before being made mostly obsolete by advances in tank design. I feel like the Panzer III may not get the recognition it deserves being in the shadow of its late war cousins. 

The L variant boasted an upgraded 50mm KwK 39 main gun, thicker armour and torsion bar suspension in an attempt to bring the aging design up to snuff, but ultimately it was regulated to secondary roles from the middle of 1943 onwards. However the chassis did remain in production as the basis for the StuG III assault gun right up to the end of the war.

What's in the box!?

As you can see the kit comes with 3 different sprues and the two identical sprues containing the tracks. It was a surprise to see the die cast chassis piece when I opened it up (I obviously didn't pay much attention to the box when picking it out at the hobby shop lol). That's something new to me and I guess the extra weight will give a more satisfying feel, I'll have to remember not to use my usual poly cement however. 

Winter Camo

In the battlefields of WW2 tanks and other vehicles were often roughly coated with whatever the crews could get their hands on to match the changing environments. In winter this meant roughly covering over the default German grey or "Dunkelgrau" with lime or chalk mixed with water. Using old rags, mops and brushes this wasn't a fine art but proved to be an effective camouflage nonetheless.

So I've acquired some German Grey by AK for the base colour and I'm going to attempt to do a whitewash over the top of that to hopefully end up with a realistic looking finish, we'll see how that ends up.

This is a Panzer III J  (you can tell by the different armour configuration on the front of the hull and turret) on the eastern front and it gives you a good idea of the whitewash used and how the paint underneath is beginning to show through.