Rear hull - and connection issues

Dry-fitting the upper hull

The combat compartment and the engine room were finally complete for attaching the upper shell of the hull. First I just set the top hull onto its place and added the bits still missing next to the drive sprockets. With those I meant the arcs which included, among other things, the places where the hoops for the front tow cables were to be installed later on.

While I was playing around I glued the smaller details into the rear armour plate. While working on these it finally dawned on me what those rear-bottom hull's weird bits were there for: that's where the armour plate was attached to. That was pretty interesting.

Before attaching the rear plate I took a look at the shape of the model from behind and I saw something I really, really didn't like to see: the top armour didn't fit at all on top of the hull but grimaced like Harvey Dent himself. This was bad news for a proper attachment. Violence and brute force were not a solution here, even a small amount of pressing made the build groan nastily.

No sense in lying down under a barrage, I plopped the upper hull off and worked on the things I could actually affect at this point. The fitting issue had to be pushed into the background for slow processing.

A simple next thing followed, I built the jack and left it for a separate painting session. I had taken a few photos of some Henschel-built railroad jacks at the Asturias railway museum in Gijón, for reference. These jacks looked pretty much the same as the tank jacks, so I couldn't go too far off if I took a close look at my old vacation photos.

Finally I glued on the rear armour plate and installed everything on it except the exhaust pipe edge blocks and the aforementioned jack. My idea was to paint this as it was now, then attach the jack before doing a general weathering round.