Vinyl stickers

A handful of road wheels

To finish up my work on the bottom of the tank I cleaned up the road wheels and built the eight sets of middle wheels (depth-wise). Because I didn't feel like painting them alone, I moved on to the next phase of this kit, the rear armour.

I chosed to ignore the jack at this point, once again, because I want to paint the camo without having the jack be on the way and being problematic. Nothing really special went on the rear plate, just the exhaust pipes with their covers and the stowage bins. Then I got to attack something totally new to me.

Insta-applying the Zimmerit

The kit had a sheetful of stickers, as I earlier wrongly declared. The sheet was, in fact, a single sticker with "cut here" markings. Luckily I was going to start working with the most complicated piece so that I didn't lull myself into a false "this is easy" mindset.
Bah, it's damn easy. I just cut the main part off roughly with scissors and then did the accurate work with my xacto knife. During the process I cut off extra pieces just to make the result look less pristine and less boring.

Totally unexpectedly the bins were just single pieces with the separate lids glued on top of a solid block as a decoration. Maybe all the Panther model kits are as simple or this is one of the ways that shows why Tamiya has earned its "shake the box and take the completed model out" reputation. I don't mind at all, not everything needs to be built with sweat and swearing.

These bins also got a few pieces of the Zimmerit stickers. It doesn't look bad to me, nor was it difficult to apply. But who cares about these wip-thoughts, as the trial by fire comes when we start fooling around with paints.

I did start applying Zimmerit on the parade side of the tank yesterday morning, but I didn't have the time to extract the photos yet, so I'll mumble about that later on. There's going to be mostly a mountain of large stickers with few openings in them. That turret is going to be fun, I believe.