Finished: Project II/24

A Pinkish Panther (G)

As time has gone by, the Project Assistant II has been pondering that she wanted to repaint some parts. More pink and more space paint (Arctic Blue), but whenever there'd been time to paint, other things have felt more pressing.

 

I decided that this model was good for now and if it was modified later, it was going to be a separate case from this project. Feeling lazy I didn't dig out the light tent but reused a photo from the previous post to show how the tank ended up.

Feeling lazy didn't mean I didn't feel silly, so I took some photos of this and the slightly more serious battery-operated sibling. Both were Tamiya kitties, the older one at least used to run on a tiny eletrcic motor but I hadn't tested it out in years. The (2xAAA) batteries were flat, that was a given.

 So, this sort of entertainment this time.

Final, weird details of the pre-painted Panther

Enginerding tools

I had asked much earlier, if Project Assistant II wanted the tools painted separately and at that point the answer had been yes. So I spent a moment one evening to paint them: dark grey base for the metallic parts, and wooden parts with AK Interactive's wood set in a couple of layers. This time I went for the darker browns. Then I sorted the bits into order and superglued them on.

The superglue applicator trick

Maybe I lamented about my superglue being runnier than what I preferred the previous time I used it, and that had the habit of increasing the risks of making a mess. Now I learned from some smarter internauts. I just dropped a tiny puddle of superglue on my palette stand-in and used a bit of bent wire to apply it in places. For my requirements this was more than accurate enough, as I got the glue exactly where I wanted to.

Shovel and wire cutters, C-hook missing

Extinguisher, startup-crank, axe. C-hook 2 missing

Sledgehammer and a prybar, the top one was molded in

Especially the fine-tuning sledgehammer's handle looked fine by me. Funnily enough I hadn't realized earlier that the lump in the end was an attachment piece, but the model's owner didn't mind my silly mistake.

For some reason the Project Assistant II was very eager to get the jack installed onto the tank, even though she didn't know what and why it was. Still, I built it and obediently installed it.

Oil wash

Again with a gracious permission I added shadows with Abteilung's Sepia. I didn't go overboard, I just wanted to see and show that the details could be made pop out with a tiny bit of paint. I think it took maybe half an hour all in all, and I didn't even touch the road wheels because I didn't want to make the rainbow darker.

Now the parade of colours only missed the final touches of the artist, if it was to be had, and then a final protective layer of Humbrol's dull cote.

Painting over the pre-painted Panther

Just paint over it

Before I had glued in the road wheels etc, I gave the model for the Project Assistant II to paint. No one should have been confused that this was going to becom a pink panther.

Pink Panther, the

We got permission to use some pink (VGC 72013 Squid Pink) from Project Assistant I's collection. This paint had been sitting untouched for about six years, and it was still useable with a tiny bit of tap water on the bristles.

After the first painting session I installed the wheels and the stupidly-misshapen vinyl tracks. This was a fun sight indeed.

When I asked if it was ready when the wheels were painted, I only got more questions as answers. "Dad, could I also make straight lines with tape like you do?" Of course. "Can I paint blue hearts, dad?" But of course, it's your tank.

At some point I was asked if the road wheels could be painted in rainbow colours. That was something I hadn't expected and thought it might work nicely with a pink hull. She also wanted to paint the tracks somehow, but didn't know how. The near future was going to be interesting.

More paint

A couple of weeks later the painting process continued. We chose a few bottles of paint, because I had no orange nor violet in my collection (or plain dark blue, for that matter). Again more questions like "why do you have such boring colours only?" 

Yeah, we were missing a couple of shades, but that didn't matter as we could mix more. The starting point was red (VMA 71003 RLM23), yellowish (VMA 71033 Yellow Ochre), green (VMC 70942 Light Green), blue (VMA 71111 RAL5007) and a lighter blue (VMA 71318 AMT-7), and I believed we could get a decent rainbow out of those.

The orange-ish was made with a mix of yellow ochre and red, we made a couple of versions between green and blue by adding more and more AMT-7 to the green, and the violet was made with a mix of RAL-5007+RLM23. These photos were taken straight away, I expected the model to look a bit better after the paint had kicked.

On the right side we started from the front even though the rainbow would've been more accurate had I realized to tell her to start from the idler wheel. It turned out cool anyway. If I had another extra Panther, I might be persuadable to make my own version of this, meaning otherwise the same but with a bit more care and maybe with a multi-pink pattern just for the fun of it.

Bling

Then what? The youth heard of my metallic paints, so they were now a must. The pinkness suffered but the artist's eye was uncontrollable.

After the rainbow day the barrel was more grey than anything else, and the turret's top ended up being brightly brassy (VMA Brassy Brass).

Suddendly the tank's left hull and the front glacis plate turned into steel (VMA Steel) with some random sky-blue effects (VMA Arctic Blue). Somehow the right side didn't lose the pink. I really didn't understand the plan here, but I thought it wasn't really required, either.

Assembling the pre-painted Panther

Hull

Evening 1

As always, these things started with the Panzerwanne. Before I could glue in all the sixteen torsion bar arms and the axles for the idler wheels, I had to clean them up a bit to get them glued in. Also the corners in the front - and the bits that glued there had to be scratched clean first. This was the first time I had to be cleaning these up and I was already getting fed up with it.

Maybe you could see from the photos, I did again some enhancing to the flame cut marks on the puzzle piece joints (I knew there was a name for this but I wasn't aware of it). It had been a fun effect on the Jagdpanzer and practice made one better.

Despite the shocked look in the upper part of the rear armour plate it fit in perfectly.

Evening 2

I kept soldiering on and installed the top hull on the Panzerwanne trusting myself in getting the running gear nicely in despite the mudflaps in the front. The jack was not installed yet, but I guessed I had to build and put it in later on. Speaking of the various and numerous tools on a German tank, I was most likely going to leave a good bunch of them off. Or maybe I ought to put them in place despite how I expected the youth to treat the model later on.

Here we had a couple of piecesets that had been painted white that showed through in unexpected places. It bothered me, but this tank was going to be thoroughly repainted soon anyway so I could ignore the strange choices.  On the engine deck I was just missing a few lids and the door, from the front it was mostly just the MG barrel, the gun's travel lock, and the lamp.

Evening 3

Adding more previously missing pieces. The more of those I glued on, the more the previously overpainted glueable surfaces got on my nerves. Just the previous evening I was thinking of skipping the track link holders on the side hull, the tool racks and whatnot. Then I thought that I ought to build it properly so that the Project Assistant II had as dedicatedly built a model as she could.

In any case I was going to superglue the engineering tools and the other tools when the tank's repainting was done. That gun barrel cleaning tool's cylinder was the most worrysome bit, I wasn't sure how much force the paintbrusher was going to apply on these bits...

Turret

Evening 4

The 7.5 cm KwK 42 L/70 was a simple build, again the largest amount of tooth-grinding came from the forced cleaning up of the paint. I also didn't remember Tamiya's approach of using a long screw as the gun's axle.

I didn't spend much time on the gun's operator end, I just glued them together and the cannon itself into the turret. The turret's interior details I didn't build this time, those were mostly the handles on the hatches and the flip-flop seats for the gunner and the commander, and the hatches I glued shut. The overzealous prepainting over 100% of the pieces was a huge detractor again.

There was a thing I wanted to specially mention in the photo above: Tamiya's instructions named many of the components unlike the Zvezda's instructions, for example. At least I liked to know what I was more or less working on, if I didn't recognize the component's name and or function already.

This turret photo showed the upper armour plate on the gun mantlet still missing. Also the handle of the commander's hatch had snapped off, so I had to either find the wandering tiny piece or make a new one from some thin metal wire.

Running gear

Evenings 5 and 6

Now I had this bright idea of trying a new approach to the running gear, it was a simple trick that for some reason I just had never tried myself. I was going to set the wheels in place, then glue them to each other but not on the axles yet, so I could later attach/detach the insanity-inducing wheelset in one piece with the tracks on them already.

First I laid in the four inner road wheels.

Next I used a dot of superglue to the parts where the inner road wheel pair would connect with. The superglue I owned happened to be annoyingly slow, so I had to leave them set for a longer time. Maybe I could've used some baking powder to do this quicker. Maybe with the outer wheels, then.

While these were setting I decided to try if I could make the right side's wheelery a bit quicker by making it a bit more complicated in its own way. In this first set I was mostly worried about the connection between the outer roadwheels, because they didn't touch the middle ones the same way the inner ones did, and I'd just have to glue the inner and outer wheels together in a confined space. So for the other sets I just glued the in-out pairs together so I could just align the interlaved wheel pairs when plopping them in place and together.

[PHOTOS MISSING DUE TO USER ERROR]

Playing with the right side's wheels wasn't a big operation, but while working on them I rememebered seeing someone doing all this with one more change: they left the torsion bar arms unglued from the hull as well. That I could've tried, had I thought of it.

Of course I forgot to take the photos in between, so there were no photos of the roadwheel setup, nor any from the bent-out-of-shape track installation either. Those things had been forced into weird angles by being bound into a tight strange loop with rubber bands that came apart when I touched them. These band tracks just felt too tight always, as they didn't sag on the way back at all, there wasn't much else to say.

Project II/24

Tamiya Panther Ausf. G early

This model was from the same 2017 "new home for some orphaned models" case from some modeler's estate. Unlike the Jagdpanzer IV, this had been already painted and a bit too much, compared to my building process. Building the model would take a bit more time than normally, as I had to clean up the contact surfaces somehow.

Hmh. An early version of the Ausführung G, this sounded so very familiar. I was pretty sure that I had built this exact same set years ago.

I checked what my documented history said and the motorized Panther (Project IV/14) was the one I thought of. So no, I hadn't done the same set, or at least the same SKU, as this had a couple of self-explanatory differences with the wheels and the tiny motor as well.

Previously owned content

There wasn't anything special to say about the Tamiya instructions, I rarely had anything to grumble about with them. The previous owner had made their own markings about this and that, mostly about paints, on some subassemblies.

 

But the instructions were not specially important, I thought I could've somehow easily assembled the model without looking at the instructions. Still, I was going to use them as usual to avoid wasting time.

I was much more concerned about the pre-painted bits, like I mentioned earlier. Yes, this was an approach I had tried before, the last time was in the long Königstiger project, and then I saw that it didn't really work for me.

Maybe there was some point to painting things in the sprues if you protected all the glueable surfaces from the paint. And if you didn't use a very thing glue that ruined paints if it flowed over.

 

The instructions said that the flexible tracks were simply glueable and paintable. We'd see about that later, but the painting process (or its one-person steering group) would be run by Project Assistant II. This model got to the top of the priority pile due to her humble requests 😅