StuG III Ausf. G tracks

Panzer III/IV type 6B w/cleats

I ordered two identical sets of tracks, even though I considered getting the Winterketten for one of the targets. There'd be time for those later on, now I simply didn't feel it.

Track assembly

Based on my eyeballed measures I decided that about 28cm per side was a good first goal for the track lenght, and then continue from that a link or a couple at a time until reaching the proper lenght. Because of this I did not glue the wheelsets into the StuG, as that made playing with the tracks so much easier. The guesstimated 28cm was three roadwheelfuls too short, as the photo showed, so I assembled more until I did get the ends joined. The actual lenght was ~33cm which gave me some looseness for a bit of sag.

With the tracks built to a good length and repeatedly dry-fitted, A/B pins correctly aligned and the first-buit track marked on the right (the left side when facing forward) side, I could paint them. In addition to the driving tracks I built two short bits of track armour to be hanged on the back wall of the casemate.

Track painting

To keep the tracks somehow in control while painting them I simply laid a decent length of painter's tape with the glue side up, and taped that from the ends onto the instructions. It was going to hold the tracks nicely enough for some airbrushing.

I started, somewhat obviously, with thin layers of Vallejo's black primer. While working on them I took a number of WIP photos but maybe one here was going to be sufficient: 

Over the black I airbrushed some black grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) to act as the bare steel, in somewhat nebulous pattern. In my mind that gave these tracks a bit of a surface texture.

This time I really had to remember that also the closing pins needed to be painted so they wouldn't stand out in their greyness from the finished model. I kept repeating this to myself constantly, because I knew my weaknesses or at least a couple of them.

Dirt foundation

Weathering the tracks got started with a really thinned down brown (VMC 70826 German Camo Medium Brown) to get some kind of a long-lived earth and dirtiness over the steel tracks. As a colour I believed Chocolate Brown would've worked even better but I also thought this sort of a brown was going to work nicely as well. Later on I could and would add darker brown for fresh, wet mud/earth.

I wasn't going to go far with the weathering while the tracks were laid open, because weathering needed to be done when the build was done and the aforementioned last pins were also painted and not shining like a kilo of radium in the night. These two track armour pieces didn't of course take the same kind of weathering that the running tracks did, but I started the same way anyway.

Gunmetal for the polished inner parts

I started by thinning down gunmetal (VMA 71072 Gunmetal) mostly because I knew my paint to be a few years old, and also the thinner paint wasn't going to be a bad idea. Those guiding teeth were a handy detail to start with, so I didn't test anything on the most visible details.

After the teeth were done I checked with a road wheel what part of the inner track was going to be ground clean while driving. Just about the full flat surface, just as one could've expected. 

With that checked I painted the metal band with the thinned-down paint, applying a cautious layer. Of course I hadn't really seen a running tank close by in almost 25 years and even then I didn't pay attention to those parts, so the realism or believability of this approach was based on assumptions. I thought this'd look better than the pure steel bands I painted some years ago on the German-captured IS-2.

Earthy tones

After that was done I closed up the tracks and painted the pins with black grey right away. Then I drybrushed the outer and side edges and that was simple enough with the loops. Before I was going to install the tracks on the assault gun, I painted a layer of heavily thinned down dirty brown (VMA 71133 Dirt).

Track attachment

Installing the tracks was pretty simple this time, thanks to me not gluing the return rollers or any others yet. My track had more lenght than I thought it did, these photos showed all the looseness hanging below the road wheels due to the installation order. I left the wheels and their glue to flash, I didn't want to accidentally plop anything out while readjusting the tracks.

 

The next evening I glued the road wheels onto the tracks to secure the sag in the correct part, so it hung from the return rollers. If something started bothering me, I could still readjust later.

This was enough of track play for the time being. Making them messier was going to happen when the rest of the vehicle was getting weathered.

StuG III Ausf. G paintjob

Acrylic painting

I decided to compress a week's worth of painting rambling into one post, from priming to camouflage and basic painting of tools and such. Maybe this'd work as a single entity, as long as I didn't start overdoing the untracked wordcount.

Black primer

The primer went on in two sessions, especially as my first pass had left some uncovered gaps. This photo here, after the first pass, showed the unpainted valleys by the driver's vision port. Unacceptable! Two fine passes were more than good.

Anticorrosion paint test

For the factory-applied red paint I bought a new bottle, they didn't happen to have red brown nor hull brown on the shelf, so I just decided to go with RLM26 (VMA 71105 Brown RLM26) and if needed, mix in a drop of red if it was too brown. Based on a test blast the RLM paint seemed just what I needed, so I didn't start mixing.

As usual, I didn't stress too much about a perfect coverage with this paint, as the primer was going to provide shadows where this didn't reach. Also a bit of a cloudy coverage pattern was only giving more surface texture to the armour plates, unlike a 100% flat coat.

This belly up -photo showed that I had also painted the track well that would never show anywhere, also in this red-brown. After that I didn't do anything specific on them, because they definitely didn't need a camo.

Guess, what I remembered right after taking these photos? I had been so excited about trying out the rolled steel texture, and then promptly forgotten the whole procedure and jumped straight to painting. Not that it was a huge mistake, I was just a bit grumbly because I was looking forward to testing the fun method for a second time.

Sand yellow

My first idea was to use straight Dunkelgelb, as I had bought it some time ago, but the other cat was again sleeping on the deep storage. I went for plan B, sand yellow (VMA71278 Sand Yellow RLM79). It was a very nice paint, no complaints.

Maybe at some point someone was going to ask me what in the Empire am I doing, painting Heer stuff with Luftwaffe paints. Or maybe not.

My wheels needed another round with sandy still, but mostly they were about to be used. Of course I had to build the Panzerwerk Design tracks that I had ordered (I actually ordered two sets, both type 6B w/ cleats) because the last time the tracks were simply great.

A shrapnel pattern

Something brought the idea of making a tight shrapnel pattern instead of freehanding. To implement that I sliced about 2mm-3mm wide bands of masking tape, and cut those between 2cm and 4cm long strips. Those then flew along the hull where they felt like going, just like Bob Ross had instructed.

If I knew how to count, I'd make it directly a three-tone camo, but I started blasting to have sandy borders for the green (VMA 71022 Light Green RLM82) and brown (the sameBrown RLM26 that ought to have been darkened down a notch) polygons. As they were, it wasn't doable to get alternating colours always side by side. Because of that and the colours themselves it looked for a moment like a bag of Finnish candy.

The next evening I masked off a few silly polygons and repainted them with sandy yellow. It immediately toned the candy bag effect down a bit, but the reddish brown was still a bit too bright for my eyes, and not only in the photos but in real world as well.

Fixing the brown

Thinning down one of the Panzer Aces set's browns (VMC 70826 German Camo Medium Brown) and used that to take the red browns down to earth. Washing and filtering this would also become calmer, but I wanted to get to that from a slightly nicer place.

Engineering tools and other metallic bits

During that same session I got to start with the tools and such, like the C hooks, axe, starting crank, shovel and the crowbar. Somehow the fine-tuning sledgehammer escaped my eyes completely in the rush, but to compensate they caught the periscopes instead. Painting them with jeweled lenses interested me in some twisted way.

 

The photos here showed that I started on the wooden bits for the tools and the jack block. As the base I used a light brown (VMC 70875 Beige Brown) that got some thin lines of lighter brown (VMC 70825 German Camo Pale Brown) along the imagined patterns. They still needed something, as always. I also had to touch up the bare metals later, for the photos revealed ruthlessly how some parts were completely untouched.

 

Bits painting, cont.

On the second detail painting round I fixed the previously missed metal pieces with black grey. When they, too, had flashed, I drybrushed all unpainted metal surfaces with cold grey (VGA 72750 Cold Grey). I still needed to do the glass lenses of the periscopes black to do anything reasonable for / to them. Photo #4 below showed that I had snapped the crowbar in two and failed to fix it well.

That protector of the gun barrel cleaning rod I painted in uniform green (VMC 70922 Uniform Green), imagining it was made of spare fabric or something, but I only did that after taking the photo. My wood approach still didn't convince me, but to be honest, it never really did.

As my habit seemed to be, I also forgot to take a photo that showed the rubbery radio antenna bases. I also hadn't taken photos of the rubber pads by the axles, either. While playing with the tire black I went around all of the double road wheels. You'd see them when I got to show those bits again.

StuG III Ausf. G build

A five-evening construction show

Cutting plastic, sanding, dry-fitting and playing glue was something I had been missing when I mostly just painted the preassembled miniatures for a good while. Now I could tinker to my heart's content.

[0] build init

Some tinkering had been pre-tinkered for me, as the build got a kickstart with the torsion arms being already molded on the Panzerwanne. I was only tasked to install the bits for the drive sprockets, some suspension-related bits and stoppers, and the track tension adjusting setup where the idler wheels attached. Most of the time went to cleaning the bits up, and careful positioning with my suffering fingertips.

Missing from the photos: all the wheels with their cleanups and gluings.

[1] casemate

The second subtopic was the 105mm howitzer and the assault gun's casemate. In principle the gun was supposed to be movable to some degree both traversing and elevating, but the accordion piece I chose kept it pretty tightly locked in one position.

The gunner had their own periscope, which was probably very unfun in a bad weather, considering the openness of the roof.

This time the commander didn't get a machine gun installed on the cupola, but they got a two-branch binocular for stereoscopic vision. I could've built the loader's hatches open but as there was nothing but emptiness to be seen on the inside, I glued them shut.

In the back wall there was a rack for the track armour, I even had some remaining track links from the DAK PzKfw IV project that I could use here instead of any kit bits.

[2] deck

My third build evening took me to the assault gun's deck. I was assuming in advance that this'd be very quick and pretty simple. Hah.

At this point I didn't glue the backup road wheels on the rear deck, despite the instructions telling me to go for it.

Mistake: I set up the cooling grilles just like the instructions told me to. Only a bit later I realized that there were much better-looking PE bits in the little bag. This was my own stupidity, I didn't check what the photoetch sprue had as I trusted the instructions to at least suggest them as optional parts the way they are usually done. I kept them for later use, I didn't feel like dissolving these connections later on.

I found the sprue markings a bit funny. Sometimes I spent a stupid amount of time to find a duplicate part, much more time than actually using said pieces :D

[3] connecting hull parts

With the deck and its stuff done, I glued the casemate into the upper hull and got something pretty acceptable-looking on the desk.

More grumbling about the instructions and their cleverness. In this case the gun's travel lock and the headlight were marked so very weirdly that I didn't somehow understand what it was trying to show me. I ended up gluing the travel lock into the middle of the upper front glacis plate, which I a bit too late realized to be offset from where it belonged. Yes, I had the travel lock on the spot of the light. Again, I didn't start dissolving my installation but let it be, because I would've only caused more damage than good.

Some more frowning with the instructions, but now on the opposite side of the vehicle. The relative obscurity of the illustrations and the interesting gluing targets kicked my ankles, now with the exhaust pipes. There were surprisingly few pin-hole pairs for aligning the pieces, most of the "glue something here" areas were just some gently raised flat surfaces, which made aligning anything a bit weird.

In the photo below I had two exhaust pipes with their mufflers facing away from each other, and between them the attachment for a tow cable. Then I was to install a fiddly bracket-shaped set of protective metal sheet, the other extreme end simply didn't go where it was supposed to fit. How was this possible? I was a bit confused, as the space between the exhausts was dictated by the towing hook assembly, there was no way to get them any closer to each other.

[4] finishing touches

For the last evening I had a few silly pieces left to install. That small mysterious piece of aluminium was the gun barrel that was much nicer-looking than the plastic options with muzzle brakes. This was also the moment that validated my failure with the travel lock that I had misinterpreted from the illustration and weird "this one goes this way, that one goes that way" arrows.

Then the ultimate pieces, while excluding the various wheels and the tracks, were the Schürzen-racks. For whatever reason the Schürzen were not a part of this set so I assumed a crafty crew could hang camouflage nets, little trees and branches, or tarps for air cover or something along those lines.

A super-excited Finnish modeler could've tweaked this further by using the more angular piece instead of the Saukopf along with a thematically correct muzzle brake. Then they could just model some concrete armour blocks and instead of the metal racks tie down some lenghts of tree trunks. But I was not one of those people, I stuck to the sometimes annoying instructions.