Tamiya 1/48 Panzer III Ausf.L Part 2

 Soooo i've finally made a start on this little beaut, give me a sec to read the last post to see where I got up to. Ahh yes I opened the box 🤣.

Right so the build started with gluing parts to the provided die cast hull. I don't have the right glue that Tamiya suggests so I went with poly cement hoping that it provided enough adherence. And it worked from what I can see. Not buying extra modelling shizzle if I can avoid it, we'll just make do!

Of course I did something wrong in my haste. There's a little tool hidden away in the corner of the instructions to line up the hull escape hatches and I didn't know because it's not obvious and I'm an idiot. Luckily my supreme knowledge of boxy WW2 AFV's came in useful and I wasn't a million miles off from what I guessed anyway. It's funny because while doing it I did think 'hmm this shouldn't just be guesswork'. 

And here comes everyone's favourite part, not. After you do a few bits on the hull it's inevitable that you come to the running gear on a tank and that means the wheels and tracks. To give it credit this model wasn't too bad, but being 1/48 it is still very fiddly.

After priming the hull and various bits of the running gear I attacked the hull with AK paints German grey AK11025. Really impressed with this actually, it went on rather well with a brush. Thinned down with a bit of water and applied 2 coats. Did the same with the sprockets and wheels but also added the black rubber tyres to the road wheels before gluing them to the hull, much easier that way. I always fully constructed models before attempting to paint in the past, it was about as painful as you can imagine.

In keeping with the theme of painting before construction I decided to try it out with the tracks as well, I kept them on the sprues while I sprayed them with black primer. This worked okay, but obviously you need to free them and sand parts down to get them to fit right which undid quite a bit of the work. I also had an issue where the glue would strip the paint completely wherever you used it. A little annoying but still a net positive I think, only little touch ups required.

Now the tricky parts over we can get back to something a bit more fun and finish the first leg of the build. This top section of the hull seemed like a walk in the park after messing around with all the small track pieces. Only difficult parts were the little headlights, they didn't have much of an indentation to sit in and they enjoyed falling over whilst the glue set but we got there in the end. Again I used grey primer and then another couple of coats with the AK German grey all over. Haven't bothered with the little details yet but they can be done when it is all complete.

As we come to the end of another year it's time for the cliche questions that you always ask yourself. You know the ones; 'what went well?', 'what have you accomplished?', 'What would you do differently?'. And while i'm not going to answer any of them directly i'm just going to say that i've done a lot of the things i've set out to do this year, learnt a lot more about myself and i'm pretty content and happy with whats been achieved. Could I have done more? Of course, but to think like that is a mistake. While self-improvement is important, do it in such a way that you can still be grateful for what you have achieved. Endlessly striving for the next best thing sounds like a perpetual hell.

Open Passageways - All Them Witches

Love this band I must admit. A psychedelic rock vibe I suppose? Although i've yet to find anything that sounds like them. Would love to see them live next time they're in the UK.

For Skye, miss you pal x