PlasticPanzers.com Forum

Thank you Shawn!

Sadly things got slowed down a little, I've used the recent good weather for a little home improvement.

Here's the current state of affairs, it starts to look a little more complete now:


The idlers and tracks are from Dragon, it's the notorious DS but since these are from one of the first batches back in the early 2000s they are hopefully not prone to spontaneous molecular disassembly as people have reported in recent years.

And here's what mostly caused the delays:


With the scratchbuilt fenders out of the way I can now proceed with the slightly easier Eduard photoetch

Philipp

It looks already really good.

The scratch building looks nice Phil!

Thanks again everyone

Some more progress on the rear....Pretty much everything on this build takes a lot longer than anticipated. The official French photos from all sides are curse and blessing at once



The TMD air deflector saved me a lot of time, while the infantry telephone still needs even more attention. The reinforced cable was made with hand-wrapped extra thin copper wire. If someone had told me this 10 years ago....

Philipp

All that extra detail looks really good Philipp.

Vincent

Excellent job Philipp. I feel your pain about the phone cable. I did about 20 cm for my M-ATV. Tedious but so good looking in the end.

Nice work on the scratch building Philipp. Anytime I try something like that is slows me way down as well.

Shawn

Thanks again to all who joined me

It certainly took me long enough, but I think I'm done with construction:




(yep, one of the turret rubber seams has come loose)

All the little postwar modifications dragged this out a fair bit...not even the tarp shelf on the back was identical to the standard WW2 item... Time to put on some primer!

Philipp

Well done. The extra time was well spent will all the details you added.

Those DS tracks work alright for allied vehicles but I don't like them on German vehicles that had sag in their tracks. Who am I kidding. I really don't like them at all. For some reason the paint always flacks off when I paint them. Even with a good washing and primer coat I still have problems.

Shawn

Thanks Shawn!

On my last Sherman with DS tracks I had no problems, thankfully. I'm using Citadel Chaos Black for primer, it tends to stick to everything perfectly well. Of course there are still the infamous quality issues with DS....thankfully mine are taken from an older kit that won't need them and will hopefully behave well in the long term.

Shermans are pretty much the only vehicle where I use DS or vinyl tracks, it just looks wrong on vehicles with "dead" track. I've used Bronco individual track links before, but here I wanted to save some time and money.

Philipp