An axle and some of its friends

Again the order of the instructions were a bit peculiar to me, of course I could've ignored that and just build these idler wheels when I built the drive sprockets. Or I could've just left them to wait for a priming and basecoating round, just like I intended to work with the road wheels. Apparently being consistent was someone else's method for working, not mine.

Transfer or power

Because the engine lived in the butt-end of the royal kitty and the gearbox complex in the front, something was clearly needed to make these setups communicate between each other. For that a couple of support setups were installed to the bottom of the tank (in the photo below, along the centerline) to attach the mechanical components onto.

The block assembled in the steps 15-16 was clearly something important related to this. I still had no idea about any of this particular subject, I just assumed it was some sort of a pre-gearbox thing, that for some reason was there, halfway between the gearbox and the engine.

The torque to this fresh piece of equipment was transferred by the first axle piece. This part lived just below where the turret's basked was going to be, so this could not be a random coincidence.

At this point I left the second axle to wait for a later stage, while whatever I had just installed was curing. Next I built a couple of walls to sandwich the motor. Before installing said motor. I found this slightly unnerving.

Onto both of these side walls I needed to install a strange-looking bit, seen below. Its function was not apparent from the pics, so I just assembled them, glued them in place and left poking as instructed.

These new walls didn't settle in as straight as their prussian heritage made me expect. Of course this flimsiness would be beneficial when installing the engine and its pipes, otherwise there'd be lots of breaking, and perhaps a couple of swear words filling the airways.

While these space dividers were setting, I glued the gearbox complex into the front floor of the tank, without forgetting the frontmost axle between the gearbox and the middle box. The positioning of these pieces were a bit off, I felt, as when the gearbox was accurately in the front, the rear end wasn't. Additionally this also affected the attachment of the axle too.