Jagdpanzering 4

Fourth session

Jumping just a bit around the build path moved to the return rollers. I had to admit, that I had to recheck how they were called, these pieces had not been common in my projects so far.

Luckily there were only four sets of these flimsy bits on each side of the tanks. Had there been many more, I surely would've broken some of them by accident...

I was a bit surprised as the instructions now told me to cruelly slice off some bits of the front left/right edges of the Panzerwanne. Of course I did as instructed. The cutting lines were pretty clear, so I didn't have to guess or do this blindly.

Jagdpanzering 3

Third session

Now that I found one of my pin vices I could proceed with the rear armour plate. Or punching holes through it, as the remaining pieces for this stage required locating holes for their pins.

Rather excitingly 66,666...% of the freshly drilled holes were left to wait for a bright future. As long as the instructions were up to date, I was expecting zero problems with these.

An effect test, again 

Next I cleaned up the lower glacis plate for installation. Based on the recommendations of a couple of colleagues, I had listened to some episodes of Uncle Night Shift in 'tube and while that guy was taking his processes to a few levels further, some of his ideas sounded plausible for me to try even if I wasn't going to try all of his ideas. One neat little thing I saw in one of the first clips I saw: making/improving the flame cut markings in the armour plate edges in the jigsaw-puzzle -like joints using a hobby knife (and then toning it down a bit with a quick and simple dash of liquid cement).

Just to be kind of safe, I started with one section only. The result looked neat, and it didn't take much time at all. At this point I didn't play with the liquid cement and postponed it to a later timeslot.

At least based on this test on the lower glacis plate the results were nice-looking and a pretty hassle-free thing to do. How that affected the full model itself remained to be seen.

Lower hull work

Now I  glued the front- and rear armour plates into the bottom hull. A good amount of the suspension setup got also installed, the road wheel spring housings were still waiting for their turns.

What in the Empire had been done next to this model, as the bottom of the model was that splashed?

Jagdpanzering 2

Second session

With the larger wheels out of the way for the moment, I got directed to the assembly of these thingamabobs that held the idler wheels. In the photo below the first one was done, while the second one was in its component form. Yeah, the lightning setup was awful, my apologies.

In addition to the bits above I glued a few key pieces into the rear armour plate. The required holes were left undrilled, because I hadn't set my pin vise as a key tool, and I spent the rest of my hobby time searching for one of them.

Jagdpanzering 1

The first session

This gently short first building session was short, because I had started by documenting the project init details. For this model the first steps were assembling the Panzer IV's road wheels and its friends. Detaching and cleaning them all was, as everyone who's ever done this probably agrees with, pretty tedious.

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.