Jagdpanzering 10-12

Tenth, eleventh and even twelveth session

10

This session got started by me going through each of the flame cut edges I had been working on throughout the build. Somehow I had managed to not notice that I hadn't treated each of them yet. Whoops.

While looking at these edges I decided that if I didn't manage to glue and press the casemate's front plate snugly against the frame I would be puttying and sanding for sometime, and more than I had expected. That stuff was tedious, but one couldn't leave the model looking like this, either.

Anyway, I glued the exhaust pipe into the rear of the machine. While that was settling in place I spent a while being terrorized by the roadwheel-side of the Revell track links. Those were full of massive chunks of excess plastic from the moulds. Without a quick visual confirmation on the sprues in the box I was expecting them to be equally awful all around.

I was pondering if I should have picked up a file or the dremel into my hand next. With this track link count and amount of annoyance I was gently leaning towards the motorized tool but I had to remind myself that it could be a bit of a brute of a tool for this business.

To top this all I had been postponing the final cleanup of the roadwheels and their colleagues, but at this point in the construction process all I had left was the unfun like cleaning and fixing. Without more interesting options I accepted what was coming and picked up a file. About thirty calm minutes later these bits were ready for the next stage.

11

For this stage I changed my posting decision so that I combined the following 2x45min sessionfuls of whining to this one post. I still documented and numbered my photos so that I could follow my own time usage. The rest of you might not be that interested in such details.

First I clogged all the extra cracks, crevices and holes with putty. The many years old Mr White Putty was baffling in its quickness to dry. I had gotten used to the process of me first squirting an amount of putty onto something, and then applying it onto the model in smaller amounts. It was still good enough to get the issues fixed, but the next time I'd buy something that would give me a bit more time to work with it. I really wasn't bothered if I had to actually wait a bit before sanding/filing.

After that I finally started working on the track links, in this photo some of them had been filed smoother, while the lower row showed untouched links with the ejector marks. I just filed them with a small flat-headed file (I tried a few, this one worked the best for me here) and did that on enough links to get the upwards-facing ones fixed. Oh yes, I was about to cheat by leaving the ones you couldn't see from normal viewing angles untouched.

12

Well of course I couldn't just leave them unprocessed, because the knowledge of doing this the lazy way (or not doing even that much) would've bothered me later on. And as we have all noticed, one could never count on the angles, either.

Amazingly I got the full set filed during my 45 minutes. At some point I calculated how many I had left, and as it was only 96 to go, it felt like it was going to be done in a blink compared to the pile I had filed already. All this felt pretty nastily in my filing-hand's wrist.

After filing the track links, I sanded away most of the annoying paint stains and the few badly cleaned up plastic bits in some corners. Not all of the prepainted stuff was removable in a reasonable time, but the improvement felt good. The armoured surfaces may have suffered a bit from my over-rough sandpaper. This sounded like another case of a new round in the endless arms race just behind the corner.

In my own opinion I managed to clean the rear side hull's  unnecessary gaps shut and cleaned up pretty nicely. I was almost surprised by the fact that patience brought better results than rushing. Who'd thought?

Finally I washed the whole damn thing clean of plastic dust and whatnot. First I did the triplet of track link sprues, and then the tank destroyer itself. Then I just left it inside its box on top of some kitchen paper to dry, and to prevent redustification.