Painting shells

Primes

Yet again I found myself priming some pieces. While I was at it I primed the upper hull's new bits red; with the bone I primed the ammunition, the MG ammo packs, the PE shelf-ends and the new inner walls of the upper hull.

Then I painted the machine gun ammo packs and the photoetch pieces grey-white. The accidentally knocked-off A-shaped pieces that I had glued on the last time I also painted now (in the second photo, on the blue masking tape), as they were handily available withouth the hassle of masking everything else off.

After the grenades' primer layers were dry, I blasted them thoroughly (over a couple of painting sesions) with brass (VMA 71067 Bright Brass). This paint's coverage wasn't perfect, so I was going to touch them up later.

All of this fun stuff had eaten a couple of evening's hobby time, as I chose to paint each part from two directions with a long drying time in between. I just didn't want to ruin the surfaces with fingerprints and whatnot. While the airbrushings were sitting tight I poked the lower hull a bit. I added some variety to the red-brown flatness by painting the piece of machinery under the turret's basked with Engine Grey.

Painting

At this point I repainted the grenades with the paintbrush. Those MG pouches installed onto the rib piece looked like they were all brassy as well, but this wasn't the case: it was all Dunkelgelb.

Now that I was done with the airbrushing for a moment, I also handpainted the shelf-parts of the ammo racks with grey-white, except the outside-facing angled surfaces. These outer edges I'd paint red-brown later on.

With the brassiness applied I started pondering on what kind of shells each of the shelves contained. There were four variants on offer, one had a brassy case with a black grenade; the others had a blackish shiny metallic case with different-coloured projectile variants (green body with a large or a small metallic tip). Sadly I had absolutely no idea, what any of these translated to.

The always-so-helpful interwebs were (again) very much in disagreement about the colourings of the rounds, I was only interested in following the provided painting guide. For example, in a reference pic below the black and green projectiles were clearly differently shaped, obviously, as they were very different weapons. The model's projectiles were all the same, so that didn't really help me here.

Using my trusty RNG I chose a bunch of cartridges and painted their cases metallic black (VMA 71073 Black). Looking at the labels of the reference pic above my choices were most likely pretty unrealistic, for as far as I had a clue, the Germans had much more demand than supply for the AP shells. The rest of the ammunition were going to be various types of HE or HEAT shells. Of course I was going to have a load of shells in the turret as well, so this wasn't the end of this story.

Painting the shells took a couple of evenings. All the green shells were painted with (VMA 71092) Medium Olive and the black ones with simple black (VMA 71057 Black).

Each of the black+green shells got a steel-y fuses (as instructed). The fuses were either short or long, chosen at random.

While fooling around with the metallic black I finally, one of the times, remembered the holder of the fire extinguisher at the rear end of the tank. I thought that the metallic black made lots of sense here, so I used that. Funny small detail that I almost forgot many times. After doing that I reattached the A-pieces and the riblike frame before I even dreamt of installing the ammo racks anywhere.

Installation

Being my paranoid self I checked yet again, before starting with the glue, that all the components were certainly in their right places. A couple of those had actually ended up in the wrong stack, but they were pretty easy to notice and recognize as a false entry.

I glued in the photoetch sheets to the backs of the front- and rearmost racks, but the ones in the middle didn't make sense to me the way they were supposed to be installed. The funny thing that none of these were shown in the painting instructions, either, so I just skipped the bothersome ones.

My tank was looking pretty well-packed now. Luckily I wasn't provided with a crew, as smashing those dudes in here would've broken a lot.

After all this I wanted to see what I could see from the outside, if I later on pulled the turret off. Pretty damn little, as the photos below showcased.

This one post ended up summarizing over a week of time. A part of that was because I took my almost paranoid paint-drying times seriously.

Lower ammo racks

Bombs on the side(s)

At long last my tank was advanced to the stage where I could return a couple of pages back to the combat compartment's stuff. The "shelves" were missing the ammo, but not for long!

Evening 1

First I glued on the small support pieces that were going to live between the two rearmost ammo shelves. The next half an hour I spent by detaching the shell/shelf levels and scratching the excesses off. Just piled together in place they looked pretty good already.

Photoetchies

Each of the shells got a PE bit into the bottom, that had the necessary markings and the detonator (I was a bit uncertain of the translation, here I was referring to the small explosive that is triggered by the firing pin and that sets off the propellant). Afterwards I noticed a few excess strips of metal that I had definitely not seen with my bare eyes.

This intermediate result was wonderful. All it took was a single evening's mumbling time, even though I had imagined that I was going to be quick enough to get all of these done in one sitting.

Evening 2

This second evening was the same but mirrored. I cut off the pieces off the sprue, cleaned the flash off, detached the required amount of PE discs and started supergluing them in place. Interestingly enough the time consumption was more or less constant, as it took all the time available. Luckily I again managed not to superglue my fingers together, to the model nor the PE pieces.

Dry-fit

The smallest probability of the ammunition storage pieces to get mismatched became from the fact that I stored them stacked. While painting I'd need to keep a bit more active track of who was where, if I wanted to avoid solving a puzzle as well.

What a sight that was to behold, even with the ammo racks being unpainted. Speaking of painting, getting that done was most likely going to take a good amount of time. At this point I was thinking of at least three, maybe four (shortish) evenings spent with the airbrush. Then we'd add a bit of time with paintbrushes, which'd bring up the total to a noticeable amount of time.

Some upper hull stuff

The rear deck

Assembling the rear deck started by the plate that was going to be located on top of the motor and a service hatch. Some of these bits I had primed previously, some I had ignored. Those tiny edge-positioned hooks were, as always, a source of swearing.

Installing the almost completely built slab into the rest of the rear deck was a bit more complicated than I had been mentally prepared for. Those two bits in the back, where the rear end of the plate were connected to by a tiny surface, they were so flimsy that it took extra time to get the joints secured. Doing the gluings in a couple of time-separated steps it worked just fine.

Iron Man look with PE

At this point I sat to think for a bit if I should glue the next two pieces first and decorate them later. I decided that it was going to be simpler to do it the other way, so the tiniest details could be easily accessible without the bulk of the full top of the tank being on the way.

Following the instructions I started with the right plate and its fire extinguisher, which was followed by the base of the antenna. My biggest problem here was that if my superglue had gotten out of date, the photoetch bits would've had to wait a day or two. Nicely enough the superglue was still ok.

These bright almost goldlike PE bits on top of the red primer reminded me of Iron Man's power armor. I was completely sure that someone had already done an Eisenmann tank, so I didn't even think about it.

In fear of knocking off the tiny hooks I decided that I'd do them later. To prove my point I had already managed to lose one from the main slab (and properly lose it, how else?), and I didn't want to think about how annoying it would be to crawl after even tinier pieces at that hour. With cats.

The next evening I started from the most annoying part or parts, when I started gluing on the tiny hooks in their places. One at a time with with tweezers.

While working on the left desk plate I went mad and started with the minihooks, because after fighting those everything else would become an actual pleasure. Between the photoetch grilles I added a pair of hedge trimmers, in case someone wanted to work on their topiary skills somewhere on the French countryside. They also received a PE attachment piece for extra decoration. Right now the tiny bracket didn't really bring much extra, to be honest, but I trusted it'd be better after a layer of paint.

The rear deck of the King Tiger was pretty full now. A new layer of primer would also help quite a bit. I should just remember to be careful with the grilles.

A misstep

This was a mistake I recognized much later, even though I was wondering about the weirdness at this point. Why was the front upper glacis plate so weird-looking? Before committing to the gluing stage I dry-fitted and stared at the instructions with my eyes more or less crossed "it shouldn't look like that but that's what the pic says, so I guess I have to follow it".

In plain English, my mistake was that I positioned the inner piece way too low and around the upper "lip", instead of under it and at the same time inside the tank. As said, the instructions weren't too clear with this.

Engineering tools

The upper hull's outside was progressing much more nicely with the engineer tools on the deck and along the sides. I wasn't too sure if I was going to add the tow cables later on or not. If I was going to use them, I'd do it later, because that was going to be beneficial for the painting process.

Interior armour plating

The upper-inner armour plates slid on pretty nicely. I applied some masking tape to press them tighter in place and to release my hands for more value creating tasks.

This was the point in time when it dawned to me: I had done something wrong, as there were large gaps between the walls and the radio operator's machine gun's ball thingy (or its outer armour bulge) didn't align at all! The misalignment was measurable in millimeters. I detached the inner panel, swore a lot at the fancy instructions, dry-fitted even more and found a decent position for the piece. Frustrating to say the least.

Painting some of the KT's internal details

More details

The engine room had been dominated by the red-brown so far, mostly broken by the motor's air filter's whiteish cover. To improve this I painted the radiator grilles and their top covers with grey-black. I wasn't sure if I was going to use any decals there, either.

While working on the grey-black I iterated through all the torsion bars at the bottom of the tank, as far as they were still cleanly painteable (or paintable?). I also painted the driver's steering wheel, the two front seats and backrests. The driver's righthand dashboard also became dark, I assumed it was to visually separate it from other functions.

First I painted the faces of the radios dark grey, then I started searching for reference images of FuG2 and FuG5 radios and especially for information of that top box, if it was the commander's FuG2 or something completely different. Not that I could've recognized any of these by just their shapes or surface textures. More research was added to the TODO list.

Following the painting guide I also painted the drive sprocket's openly spinning disks on the inside. I still had no idea about anything, but they sounded like an insanely serious workplace safety risk, if I had guessed their function correctly.

This was just the first of this type of painting detours, I still had plenty of details that weren't taken care of. Such as the glasses of the spare periscopes. The darkness of the torsion bars should be best visible in the next photo.

I had also started painting the firewall's fire extinguisher, it was still waiting for the metal band before I was going to paint it red for visibility. Also the boxes I guessed to be batteries, located on both sides of the axle, were still untouched.

A break

There were quite a few of these small bits that I had deliberately not primed yet, so the radio operator's machine gun's ammo boxes were pristine. I decided to glue them on now to the rib piece and paint them in place later on. Apparently the way of attaching these boxes was completely up to the builder, so I used as many as the instructions said, but instead of attempting to spread them out evenly I divided them into two inequal groups.

The combat compartment's floor housed three boxes that were to be painted dark yellow (VMA 71025 Dark Yellow), and I thought there were also a couple of similarly coloured containers on the inner walls, that I managed to forget with my limited time. The batterylike boxes I did paint this time, just like the final fuel lines that you could at long last see in the rear end of the tank.

These two photos above also revealed that I had been working on the upper hull so that the driver's and radio operator's hatch-set was glued onto the deck. Their hatches were also installed and the head protectors were also painted (again with grey black).

I abused my time machine to show a couple of internal photos from a couple of building steps further ahead, as I had been poking at the details here and there. The rear edge tanks had their airing caps painted, the firewall's fire extinguisher was now painted red, and the long block at the radio dude's legs was now dark yellow. The periscope glasses were still untouched, but at least I had touched up the first dials of the driver's dashboard. I also once managed to find a reference image of that dashboard, so I could attempt to finish it up at some point.