Still working on my first kit after getting back into the hobby after a very long hiatus. It's Tamiyas Sd.Kfz.232 kit, along with a PE set from Eduard. The kit itself is pretty good, but the PE so far was giving me fits. Today though I think I had a breakthrough and turned out something pretty nice.

This is one of the latches for the top access door to the under-fender stowage bins. The latch assembly is Eduard matched with some wire I had hanging around for scratch barbed-wire. I included the PE horn from the same kit to give it a bit of scale so you can see how damn tiny some of this stuff is. So, does this look good or what!




Oh, and if anyone has used this Eduard PE kit before, a question. What exactly was their thinking in adding in new hinges for the various hatches on the vehicle when their PE is woefully undersized for the task? The original hinges on the Tamiya kit may be a bit over-large, but their much closer to the photos I've seen than the Eduard replacement parts which have zero depth to them and no actual hinge pin thickness.

Looking good, Kevin.

I would say that you do have it !! Thats fantastic,I couldn't even see that part,for now I stick with screeens and fenders and bigger items.looking foward to the outcome.

Now I hate you. I lost ever single "£$"£$" piece of that assembly not long ago...
Really nice work. Please share the secret. I'm sick of messing up all my fancy PE sets.

How to properly use PE-
super tiny tweezers
thick, slow setting super glue
careful cutting with a new, sharp blade
think before you bend/ cut/ glue!
PATIENCE!

Your just looking to make yourself go insane quicker than the rest of us. Nice little piece of work you got going there.

Exactly what I would say. At times I was almost thinking of those techniques snipers use for a steady shot.

"Okay, exhale slowly, hold, now bend. Inhale slowly, hold it, place and glue."

Thats what works for me when i brush paint details!

That is some great work. I struggle every time I have to bend a small piece. The PE in my latest Dragon kit seems a bit thick and hard to bend. How close should the bend line be to the break in the bending tool? Seems like you would want it right up against it but you can't see it when it is.

Fantastic work. The only way to become good at it is patience and practice.

I'm still not quite there yet

I guess it all depends on the particular tool your using to fold. I use the 5-Speed Hold & Fold. With any tool though, I would say split the difference. Half the bend line under your clamp of choice, the other half sticking out. If you push the piece too far in, the whole pre-scored line will be under the clamp and you'll actually be bending the full thickness of PE. If it's too far out, you'll still be bending the full thickness, but the pre-scored line won't be clamped down which could break if you're giving it a lot of force. And as you say, it's true that's it's hard to see where the line is once you get it up against your bending tool. I start with the bending line well out from the clamp head, then slowly nudge the piece forward with some very fine tipped tweezers until the break is where I want it. Still, sometime I have the pull the piece back out several times until I can get the bend in the right spot.


This is where I try to place my bend as mentioned above:

Congrats on getting the working of PE down! You also came across a very nasty little truth that I discovered too late after making a time consuming mistake...PE is sometimes not quite correct in what it represents. I learned this with an Eduard kit too, just like you. From my experience, I learned to do my homework on the parts I was replacing with PE and then choosing a PE supplement that most closely matched what I was replicating with the brass..the different companies all do it differently. In my case, I had done the beautiful PE mudflap hinges for a PZ IV E and then after I got all that built (Im still new to this too) some other modelers pointed out that it wasnt really accurate and I simply hadnt paid any attention to it. I ended up learning that in my case, an Aber PE kit was much, much more accurate and since I didnt want to spend the money for yet more PE, I just went with the kit supplied plastic fenders as they are accurate too. Good luck!

Tell me about it. I was mostly lucky in that I only replaced two sets of hinges before I took a closer look at my Tankograd book on the 232 and realized that the PE hinges were really way off. I'm also curious about various thin strips of metal above hatches and on the top of the chassis (bullet splashes?). The originals tend to have an angle on them, whereas the Eduard replacements are straight rails. The Tankograd book shows 232's with mostly the angled strips, but the few photos that maybe have straight strips are lower quality and at odd angles so it's hard to tell what's what. Neither does the Ed set mention of the PE set as a whole is meant as conversion set to change the base Tamiya kit into something closer to a 231 or even a 263.

The research continues!

Kevin,

Thank you for your great description and diagram. I will keep plugging away until I get it right. I have some spare PE to play with.

The photoetch makers are sometimes victims of the old adage, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Photoetch is best at reproducing fine bits of flat, thin material, but the designers often try to replace everything small, including objects that are too thick for the brass, or are round in section, not flat.
Despite the supposed infallibility of aftermarket vendors, I've found that Eduard's research is often limited to copying a kit part in brass, not correcting it. And some bits are simply too ambitious to attempt. Eduard used to offer photoetched cooling sleeves for American machine guns which were supposed to be curved into tiny, perfect cylinders and glued or soldered edge to edge! Who were they kidding? To be fair, Eduard is not the only offender--Aber brass is frequently over-engineered.
One nice thing about Voyager and (to a lesser extent) Lion Roar detailing sets, is that they are multimedia. In addition to photoetched brass, you may get wire, plastic rod, turned brass or resin moldings, so parts are better matched to the most suitable material.
It's possible to adapt some parts, like backing a too-thin piece of brass with sheet styrene, or adding a piece of styrene rod on a hinge line, but the revelation that saved my sanity many times is the realization that YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT ALL. It's all just raw material. I look at each brass replacement part and take nothing at face value. I always ask myself, is the new part better looking or more accurate than the kit part? Many times it isn't, and I save those for the spares box, just as I would with a plastic part. And sometimes, a strip of styrene really is a better choice than a strip of brass.

Yeah, I'm slowly realizing that as I look over the Ed frets with a fine toothed comb. Another issue is that they included several of these latch assemblies, but not enough locks for each one. Fine if you want to have something open and the lock off (not that much opens with this Tamiya kit), but if you want everything closed and locked up, you have to pick and choose which latches will get locks and which ones will inexplicably be missing.

I guess in my fervor to dive into PE, I was so gung ho in trying to use every piece. I'm backing off on that now, as well as finally figuring out why the Ed instructions reference parts that the Tamiya instructions don't call for. Obviously the Ed kit was for the original Tamiya kit, and the rerelease has a new sprue of updated items that render some of the Ed parts unneeded.

Did a little bit more work on the 232 tonight. The biggest thing was replacing the engine louvers on the main body. Was a little bit of hassle in that some of the PE louvers were a hair too small, some a hair too large. I chalk that up to minor imperfections on the mating surfaces after I cut out the molded louvers on the original piece(ugh, what a pain in the butt that was). Still, a little tweaking of the PE's mating surfaces and I was able to get a good fit.

That is some very clean work you have there Kevin. Nice photos as well.

Sincerely
ANPW

Hey, Kevin
That looks awesome. Congratulations!
I just can't see well enough to mess with the "bits and pieces" of photo-etch sets anymore and my fingers seem to have grown to where I can do little more than fumble, drop and lose the stuff to the carpet monster.
I've also found what looks good to the "naked eye" appears horrendous through the lens of a camera. Yours, on the other hand, looks sweet.
Randy

Yeah, I find the same problem with stuff appearing fine to the eye, but you can suddenly see all the glue and swarf when you take a macro shot. Still, once you paint and finish the model, a lot of those little errors will disappear. Plus even when you take your final display shots, there probably won't be quite as many super-close macro shots that could show off any problems. And of course you'll be viewing the model with your own eyes in your home, so you won't even see those microscopic problems. Hell, look at the padlock in the earlier shot; there's still a little bit of fret on the side, but it's invisible by eye and won't be noticeable when I take some shots of the whole vehicle, or even just the whole fender.

While my eyes are still decent enough to do this stuff just by eye, I do still keep an Optivisor with 3.5x magnification lens on hand so I can really nail placement of items or when shaping stuff like the wire loops the locks hang off of.

I'm a rookie at this photo etch stuff, but the first kit I got was for an Abrams, and for the life of me I bent some of the parts in the wrong order, only to end up bending them too much and they would break. So I started to make enlarged photo copies of the frets and cut the parts out in paper to practice/determine where and when to fold. Sometimes I wish I had 1/35 hands!!

I know that feeling. Sometimes I stare at a 1/35th figure and think "Man, imagine the detail I could put on that guy if it was actually a foot tall statue." That, or wishing the vehicles were full size so I could detail them without worrying about a grain of sand sized drop of glue ruining the surface of something.

Looking very nice Kevin. Is this the oldTamiya kit? Wingman out.

This is the rereleased version. It does have a new sprue of updated items, but it's mainly minor stuff like the jacks and horns. The vast majority of the kit is still the old tooling from the 70's.