Panzerfeldhaubitze 18M auf Geschützwagen III/IV (Sf) Hummel, Sd.Kfz. 165
♬ Gimme dat gimme dat gimme dat shell now ♬ sang the artillerymen at some point in history. This post was very clearly missing the singing red-collared dudes, even if they were on their way to fame and glory for a few days.
Building process with surface texturing
The model was a guaranteed Tamiya kit, no problems except when my own limited spacetime awareness caused them. The first fork-up came from the racks of the spare road wheels that I installed the wrong way and they ended up being just extra stepladders for the crew. Another forkup was easier to hide and concerned the little bars that kept the gun's shield in place. The third and most irrelevant of them was that at some point I managed to get the gun glued in place and the neat elevation mechanisms became useless. That wasn't a problem because I wasn't going to use it for much more than posing for some photos, and with the scrapped diorama would've been for a store loading, not a firing mission.
This time I remembered to poke the armour plates with the thin glue and an old dedicated paintbrush. Surface texturing does work, this approach didn't show up that strongly as in the DAK Panzer IV either because I was cautious, or my painting, or for some other reason. Of course it wasn't supposed to stand out like a clown nose so maybe this was good.
Failed diorama attempt, snapping tracks
In the actual post I didn't complain that much but in the real world I did grumble quite a lot and worked on it much longer than what one might assume by the photos and texts. I was pretty close to falling into the trap of sunk cost fallacy but managed to drop the triplet into a guillotine after a few fixing attempts.
This was my third Panzerwerk Design aftermarket tracks project, and my fourth articulated AM tracks -using project ever. The first was the Panzer IV that went without a hitch, the second was the StuG III that had one track link breaking in some transfer operation, and this was the third one where both of the tracks simply snapped when closing the loops. Maybe if I had added a link per side more this could've been avoided, but my predictive weathering had made them stiffer earlier and I had been a bit concerned about their flexibility. My worries turned out to be realistic and I had to fix my stupidities later. Still, I was very happy with them and would get more in future projects. Next I'd have to try some other hull than a Pz III/IV like a Tiger or a Panther, or something not-German even if that was heretical.
The joy of camouflage and oil paints
My airbrushed camo pattern was an example of underperformance, and I could blame no one else but myself. Instead of tweaking the shapes I added the Hinterhalt-Tarnung dots. I wanted to find real life examples of that pattern on an actual Hummel but I went with my feeling, and it wasn't a hyperserious paintjob anyway. Again, this was for my own amusement and enjoyment, and especially after the waste of time and effort with the figures I found the dot painting immensely nice and relaxing.
Time consumption
To get any kind of a clue for time used I checked my photo naming convention and even if I knew that it wasn't accurately tracking 45min hobby sessions but it gave me an idea. Just using the grouping this would've been a 21h project, but I had compressed some sessions together, a full 24h day was a plausible amount of time spent all around. An amount of that was lost with the figure failure but I had been spending lots of time on small things again. I couldn't remember if I had marked this much time on any other project so far, but we were quite high in the list in any case.
Captured photons
My photos ended up pretty neat this time, even as I didn't spend an our in Krita to turn the backgrounds to #FFFFFF. Instead I left the A4 backgrounds as they were.
Continuation thoughts
Interestingly 75% of my last four German vehicles were build on the Panzer IV hull. What would be the next one? From the Flakpanzer series the Wirbelwind has always been interesting, mainly for its looks, but a Kugelblitz or a Coelian would've worked, or even a funky-looking Möbelwagen. Just the Ostwind didn't catch my interest.
Of course it was possible that the next tracked vehicle had to wait, as I had now a ridiculous idea of going for a larger scale (1:32) flying machine soon. This smelled like a 109, 262, or a Stuka depending on what the nearest shelves had available when the time came. I had had some discussions earlier, and neither Salamander nor Komet were being made in that scale these days.
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