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

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.

First Post!

 For my first post I though I would share a few pictures of the models I have previously completed in the past 2 years or so and a little bit about them.

Tiger 2 Porsche turret 1/76:

This was the model that got me back into modelling. It's one of those airfix 1/76 starter kits which includes glue, a brush and some old dried up paints. I recieved it as a Christmas present and I really enjoyed it. So much so I purchased a vallejo oiled earth wash especially for it and a few more bits and peices to really kickstart the hobby.

Churchill 7 1/76:

Another Airfix kit, although a total opposite to the King Tiger. I didn't particularly enjoy this one if i'm honest. I believe its quite an old mold? It was quite frustrating getting things to line up properly, namely the main hull and the tracks on either side if I remember correctly. So mine is a little wonky and I don't think I ever completely finished the paint as a reult of being a bit fed up with the thing.

SU-100 1/72:

Really didn't know what to expect when I bought this Zvezda kit but the quality and the ease of building it was really impressive, although coming after the nightmarish Churchill I might've been easily pleased. Bought a set of MLG ww2 Russian paints as well for this model which finished it off nicely.

IS-3 1/72:

I love the style of these early cold war era soviet beasts and I just had to get my hands on an IS-3. This Trumpeter model has a great amount of detail even if parts were a little fiddly at times, finished again with the MLG paints it looks pretty smart.

T29E1 1/35:

My first attempt at one of the massive 1/35 scale monsters and I chose a T29 after loving the T29/T30/T34 set of tanks on WoT. This was a Hobbyboss kit which was fine, nothing bad to say apart from the tracks being a bit of a slog to put together (tempted to try some ebay diecast tracks next time). I used a Humbrol light olive spray can for the base and experimented a bit with Vallejo thick mud and splash mud around the tracks and some dry Revell weathering pigments roughly brushed on.

Jaguar XJ6 1/43:

First of my car model experiments is this Jaguar banger racer. Ignore the paint for the most part it was a really quick job. I mainly just wanted to try out simulating damage and it turned out alright for a first try. It was done by starting with a 1/43 die cast model and cutting the rear and front end out with a dremel and replacing it with a roughly molded shell made out of thin sheet aluminium, then crushing it up as much as was appropriate.

The end! Thanks for reading if you got this far and stay tuned for future projects.