Panzer IV and the third party tracks

Articulated third-party individual link tracks

The title may have spoiled the decision already, but I wasn't going to bother with the kit's own link & length tracks at all. My first tracked model ever (Revell's 1:72 StuG III with a Saukopf) had those and I didn't like them one bit. Either I got traumatized by them or maybe I was just an unforgiving person.

Panzerwerk Design

Some time earlier I encountered Panzermeister36's review of a bunch of 3d printed tracks in YT and based on that I ended up looking at two different companies. Wasting time with the customs didn't really entice me so I thought I'd prefer the EU inner market and order something from the Polish Panzerwerk design, if I could figure out which of the track types (1-8) was correct enough. My other options were T-Rex studios and Tankcraft, the latter used to have the Adam Mann -consulted tracks but all of that had disappeared from their webshop. I guess they didn't want money.

Of course I had been thinking about this for ages, and during easter '24 I finally pulled my shopping pants on and dragged myself to the online store.  Then, for a good handful of days the site only returned a HTTP503 error and the console logs weren't too useful. When complaining about this out loud the store got back online the next day or the day after that in the middle of all of my back-and-forthing.

Only in the checkout stage it was said that the only payment method was paypal, which I was a bit allergic to and avoided whenever possible. So I left the almost neighbours hanging and checked my second option (spoiler: I didn't choose them but went with this set here), which I documented in the next chapter for the sake of completeness of this story.

My calendar in the Spring absolutely horrendous, so on the Monday when the courier was supposedly delivering my order the window was "during the evening" and on that single day we couldn't guarantee that someone would be home to accept it. So I accepted the shittier option of "I'll get this from a nearby fuel station instead of you carrying it to my door like I've paid you to" and another day's delay because why would these companies work in a reasonable and sane manner?

The funniest thing was that there was someone home all evening that day, but we didn't know that when the decision had to be done :D

 

T-Rex Studios

These people also had some Type 3a tracks available, so I took a closer look. The price was lower and the webshop also appeared to work.

So, sixy 'murican monies for the bits and S&H, plus customs and VAT. This would be tolerable. But when I got to the payment stage the only option was, again, paypal.

If I really had to use paypal, I'd at least then skip the customs part if I could. This was the only reason I rechecked the Panzerwerk store and would you look at that,  now it worked. Otherwise I'd ordered the T-Rex tracks without any additional grumbling.

Resin tracks in action

On a Tuesday evening I fetched my packet from a fuel station that doubled as a courier's client's pickup point. The box contained very simple instructions and three ziplog bags full of pieces: the track links and both A and B pins to connect the links together.

 

The track assembly operation

Those A and B pins were just about the thickness of a cat's whisker, and using those with these (comparably) sausage fingers of mine was interesting to say the least. I assembled my track one link at a time by holding the two attachable links tightly between my fingers, then inserting the pins one by one and immediately pressing them in with my flat-tip tweezers until they made their tiny "prip" sound.

 

You all knew I had to try the track out as soon as I had a short lenght completed to see how it wrapped around the drive sprocket. It fit like it was made for this.

Supposedly I had an excess of track links so in addition to the driving tracks I could maybe make some track armour from these.

 

Getting the right side track built took three evening sessions from me. Some of the time went to fiddling around, pondering, and finding out the way to work on this thing. And let's be honest, playing dry-fitting and testing took some time too. After the slow start I found a good method and the throughput got noticeably improved with time.

Thanks to that the left track progressed and completed much more rapidly, as I now knew how this worked. And I also had the feeling for the pieces.

While working on this I also made a short bit to be hanged in the front. Of course I didn't dry-fit enough at this point so I accidentally built it a link too long. I still had a bunch of links and pins so no panic, but I still paranoidly hoarded two pairs of A/B pairs to connect the actual tracks in the end.