Top of the hull

As the build order guided me that way, I started working on the parade side of the tank. My tactical first target was the glacis plate, the side armour and the method: more Zimmerit stickers. After those I added some small pieces like the hatches, the MG cupola and such.
Just like the last time I built a tank, I first apply the firmly installed pieces, then paint the camo. Only after that the loose items (tools, barrel-cleaning rods and so forth) would be glued in.

Of course, had I actually followed my plan properly, I wouldn't have installed the machine gun's barrel yet, but hey, this happens a lot. I guess that the dominating colour will be, traditionally, Dunkelgelb. In these next two photos you'll see the place where the gun travel lock would be, but I think I'll do the camo before I build that - even if it's a permanent piece of equipment. Those, I guess, I'll paint in flat Dg and worry about the big picture.

Vinyl stickers

A handful of road wheels

To finish up my work on the bottom of the tank I cleaned up the road wheels and built the eight sets of middle wheels (depth-wise). Because I didn't feel like painting them alone, I moved on to the next phase of this kit, the rear armour.

I chosed to ignore the jack at this point, once again, because I want to paint the camo without having the jack be on the way and being problematic. Nothing really special went on the rear plate, just the exhaust pipes with their covers and the stowage bins. Then I got to attack something totally new to me.

Insta-applying the Zimmerit

The kit had a sheetful of stickers, as I earlier wrongly declared. The sheet was, in fact, a single sticker with "cut here" markings. Luckily I was going to start working with the most complicated piece so that I didn't lull myself into a false "this is easy" mindset.
Bah, it's damn easy. I just cut the main part off roughly with scissors and then did the accurate work with my xacto knife. During the process I cut off extra pieces just to make the result look less pristine and less boring.

Totally unexpectedly the bins were just single pieces with the separate lids glued on top of a solid block as a decoration. Maybe all the Panther model kits are as simple or this is one of the ways that shows why Tamiya has earned its "shake the box and take the completed model out" reputation. I don't mind at all, not everything needs to be built with sweat and swearing.

These bins also got a few pieces of the Zimmerit stickers. It doesn't look bad to me, nor was it difficult to apply. But who cares about these wip-thoughts, as the trial by fire comes when we start fooling around with paints.

I did start applying Zimmerit on the parade side of the tank yesterday morning, but I didn't have the time to extract the photos yet, so I'll mumble about that later on. There's going to be mostly a mountain of large stickers with few openings in them. That turret is going to be fun, I believe.

The transfer of power

Fooling

I spent a surprising amount of time fooling around with the transmission setup. As soon as I had the motor-containing piece attached to the left edge of the tub, I battled the empty one into the right edge. First I tried to attach it by the bottom screw, as it made most sense to me. Wrong. It was to be attached by the frontmost screw, because that way the rest of the pieces would lock in properly.

Of course I had looked at the guide a bit funnily and one of the cogs was awfully wrong and I only noticed that when I was dropping the drive sprocket's cogs in their places. So what could I do but to open the setup, move the cog into its right place and reassemble everything.

I really should remember to lubricate all those cogs

Deviation is the best way to start anything

At this point the instructions guide you to slap on the road wheels and the tracks and then proceeding with the rest of the tank. I was pondering, if I should do it the other way and yes, I'd assemble the wheels but build everything else before finishing this particular subassembly.

The reason why I want to leave the tracks last is the simplest one: otherwise all the painting would be made way more difficult for absolutely no gain. I'll rather spray all the paints first, with a degree of confidence in having everything covered, including the shadowed and blocked areas. Because if you go and trust that "those surfaces will never be seen", those are the first ones to be seen when you take the first photo of the (more or less) completed model. And that is not fun, everyone knows that.

Therefore I quickly built the drive sprockets and idler wheels and went on for my summer vacation. This week - while you read this - I may have something decent done on the deck side of the build.

Starting from the weirdest end

As usual, I started assembling my model as the instructions told me to. The first things in my program were the connections to/from the battery box, dropping the motor in its place and preparing the track tension adjusting thingamagick for later activities. For some reason I didn't get too far, but it's a good place to keep going on after a short vacation.

Project IV/14

A motorized Panther

Let's return on the dirty ground (for half a year, even?) to avoid getting afraid of heights. From the vast pile I used to call my work queue I dug out a Tamiya's battery-powered Panther G, which'll be the last German vehicle in quite a while!

I had taken a good bunch of photos of the unboxing, but they ended blurry and unusuable, so we'll have to make do with these. At least the most exceptional ones made the cut, as everyone has seen the usual sprues and pieces already.

The battery box in the bottom tub and the motor pieces & co

Zimmerit sheets!

A very American approach to life

I was totally amazed when I found these warning labels. Warning: don't insert your fingers between rotating drive sprockets and the tracks. Glue these there, on the glacis plate, in the bestestest and vieablest place of the model.

Yeah, you go ahead and wait for me to do just that...
I'm not an american and therefore I do have some common sense left. And I am not going to sue everyone in this solar system if I do something stupid and hurt my fingers.

Project III/14

Idea

Many a year ago I bought some Italian hard licquorice (kind of like the pharmacist's salmiac one can buy here) from a Spanish pharmacy. It came in a handy metallic box, even. I immediately had an idea of using that as a medikit at work. Of course it was way too small to be called a medikit so I thought it should be called a stimpak instead.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I started playing New Vegas again. Fallout is a fine thing and it gave me the idea: the long-ignored box shall be turned into a Mentats box! Genial! Beautiful! Awesome! Wonderful!

Implementation

The basic shape(s)

For some unexplainable reason I was going lazy and started only on the top of the lid, so I masked off the bottom and the edges. As usual, I primed the thing grey and the next evening I masked the shape for the inverted green triangle (yes, I was going to paint it in this order). And the following evening I painted the rest yellow. Didn't I mix up an orange-ish paint myself to be more true to the real thing? I tried, failed and decided that the impending devlan mud washing would tone the yellow down enough.

Decoration

All sorts of imperfections and general unevenness was more than acceptable in this project. I mean, everything's shitty and worn-out in Fallout, especially tiny and portable things. For the black line on the lid I used some tape to keep the lines straight and for a moment I considered using a 0,01€ coin for the rounded corners but in the end I did them freehand.

Texts

I reserved the space for the red "Mentats" text with masking tape again. I just did it by eye instead of carefully measuring so the text ended up off-center. But it wasn't so much that I got annoyed and therefore didn't feel the need to redo it. Then I painted the black shadows and later used the same methods to paint the white "MED-TEK" inside the green triangle.

Final messification and varnishing

To finish up I applied a liberal amount of devlan mud all over. Cleanliness or lightness was of no importance or even a goal. At this point I decided that the bottom has to be painted too. So I spent a couple of extra evenings by priming, yellow-painting and messing up the visible part of the bottom.

Because this container was meant to be carried around instead of leaving it on a shelf to be a static item, I applied a varnish as well. The same Vallejo matt varnish I bought for the previous project.

Result

Of course I carried the box to work as soon as it was done, according to my plan and of course I proudly showed it around. Now my b&w Nuka-Cola -themed water bottle looks pretty poor. I guess I just have to obtain a glass bottle and a colour-printed label because war. War never changes.

It only has Strepsils inside. They don't give you +2P +2I and +1C nor are they addictive.

Project II/14

A secret surprise project

As a mad idea I ordered a Revell's 1:24 scale model of a Mercedes-Benz A-160 from the German ebay, to be represented as a birhtday gift. Because the details aren't mine, I'm going to omit most of them. I got the packet right after the easter vacation and thanks to the traditional slowness of post the thing had to be finished and sent around mid-May. In short: I'd have about six weeks.

The pieces

The shell was a single piece, the insides were pretty large chunks too. I was happily surprised by the tires: rubber wheels and chrome-like centers. There was a good amount of clear parts for windows and whatnot, I just didn't notice before the very end that the front door windows didn't even exist. You were supposed to see inside the car without any obstruction. Righty then.

The interior

I'm going to apologize already that I didn't take many wip pics. That's because I got carried away so many times that I just didn't remember to document most of the steps.

The assembly was started, as the instructions suggest, from the dashboard and the seats.



After a couple of sessions I had already built and painted the tubful of stuff. To decide the colour scheme I imagegoogled for the interior of an A-class Mercedes and chose dark insides with light grey seats. Not that I'd have time to work on fake wood strips and fancy stuff like that.
Btw, you can osmehow see the dashboard decal I used. The kit also included decals for the surfaces of the seats but I promptly ignored them, as they sounded like an idiotic idea to me.





For my own sporty amusement I painted the shock absorbers yellow and both the spring coils and the front brakes bright red. All the others were painted light grey, mostly because I haven't the faintest clue of how cars are painted and that's what the instructions suggested.

The exterior

When I was done with the insides and the base of the car, I allowed myself to attack the shell. I had already bought some VMA metallic blue (71.071 Artic Blue [sic]) for this project, even before I ordered the model itself. The blue appearance is therefore a funny coincidence and it also happens to suit the recipient. As long as it's not red, my sources led me believe.

 

The shell got two layers of blue because one didn't look nearly good enough. After that I painted the window frames, the "hems" and the door handles black, again following the google image search and the box art. Personally, I'd left the handles metallic, but I wanted to follow the real world as far as possible, for a change.



As everything else was done, I glued in the rest of the chromed and transparent parts. The glasses I glued in with white glue, in my paranoia of fogging up the clear parts with anything else. I saw a problem with this, however: connecting the shell with the rest of the model had a violent stench, based on a quick and careful pre-fit attempt. If something cracked off (thanks to the easily broken white glue bond), how in the Empire could I reattach them without ruining anyhting else? And we all know how gentle the post can be...

The result

For personalization I scribbled customized texts to the register plates. I even remembered to paint the insides of the rear light covers and touch up everything I had damaged earlier. There was a good pile of photos taken, but I'll display this subset:

Final mumblings

A peaceful modern civilian car was a fun snack project! It didn't take much time but not much was left, either, as I managed to send it off with Itella in the very last possible afternoon. Had I been less slow myself, I'd ordered it in January as I had originally planned, I'd had much more time and I could've done many more details differently and maybe do the insides completely differently. But no is ano and I don't think it went badly, anyway.
Actually, as a very rare thing, I'm quite proud of it.

A week off with some TODO mumblings

A breather

I'm going to take a short break from modeling, thanks to projects Stuka and Mercedes. So I'll waste a bit of time by showing off what got appended to my todo list in the end of April. Thanks to Lasse, my ground vehicle modeler self is going to stay far away from his comfort zone, independent of in which order I attack these four modern flying ... things.

Airborne weapons in 1:72

As you can see, there are two A-10 Warthogs. Two! [an erroneous claim removed] Also from decades past we've got an F-16 Falcon and an almost ridiculously modern F-22 Raptor. Because I am such a fan of indirect, or unfair attacks, these four can be overarmed from the Air to Ground weapons packet's contents.

I guess we'll get some fun out of these buggers, even if they come without tracks and other fun things. Just because I'm mean like that (or narrow-minded), I may paint each and every single one of them in something else than the american pattern. But then I couldn't use the decals that I had at some point threatened to try out, for the first time in more than half a lifetime.
No rush yet, I'm just mumbling out loud right now.

Extra pics

Academy A-10A - I laughed for real when I read the subtitle

Hobby Boss N/AW A-10A

Hobby Boss F-16A

Hobby Boss F-22

Hasegawa Aircraft Weapons I: bombs & rocket launchers