Definitely a lot of really great panthers that were built during this campaign.

@ spacewolfdad - thanks for the tip, your tank is coming along nicely. Lookin' really good.

@eman - I love that ersatz!


Over the past week or so, I have completed a bit more.. but I am still on step 4 all the plastic on the back is done but the brass had me slowed down to a near complete stop for a couple of reasons. First is my lack of skill.. I'm thinking in retrospect that the stowage boxes weren't the best place to start learning to solder with a torch.. lol.

as a secondary problem the AMworks IR stowage box has a few minor mistakes.. either that or I'm looking at it totally wrong.

So here is a pic of my poor boxes:





The box on the left is an Aber MNH box and the one on the right is the AMworks IR box. The MNH box folded pretty easily and looked great! Then I tried soldering it.. solder beaded up.. didn't want to be where I wanted it..etc I was using a low temp paste solder that has flux in it. I tried fluxing it, soldering from the outside, inside, you name it. Finally I got it to hold together.. I will do a little more clean up on the solder slag on the back. This is just where I decided I needed a break. Lid will be next. So I went to work on the Amworks box and folded it according to the fold creases so the indents for the latches were on the outside, and then realized that the box was backwards. The box is supposed to be for the right side of the rear wall and the box it built was for the left. I unfolded it and refolded it for the right. This puts the indents inside the box and the brass was too fragile and the front panel separated from the rest of the box. After looking at it for a while I decided my soldering skills were not up to fixing it. So I used "green stuff" epoxy putty instead. Maybe a little more than necessary but better safe than sorry.

The second problem I ran into with the AM works box is the latch instructions don't really seem to make any sense.

this is the instruction:



After much searching and a few helpful hints from other folk here on the forums I found this:



So now I have an idea of what the latch might have looked like so I can move forward with the box. Also note that if you look closely at the box I built you can see the two holes for the U lift ring but for some reason they are on the bottom of the box, not the top.

Slightly frustrated, I decided to skip over to a different part of the build. I looked at the Aber barrel and the soldering necessary to make it happen,and promptly went to a local jewelry supply store and bought some Tix low temp solder.
The difference was amazing!

Here are some pics of the Barrel:





It may not be as pretty as some of the soldering some of you guys are capable of, but its all together and I even managed to get the three microscopic pieces stacked and soldered on. Which when finished, I promptly showed to my wife and she said "You mean this little lump of solder is three pieces?" As she eyed it suspiciously. Luckily we have an old jewelers loup laying around the house which when she looked through it she said "Oh, there ARE three definate pieces here!...... nobody will ever be able to see it! You're crazy!".. Ah well.

Well off to get more done on this, I still have high hopes of finishing it in time for the end of this campaign.

James

Hi all,

Another quick update for my build.

Step 12 is complete! Ofcourse I skipped 5-11 for a bit.

So here it is:



What you can't see in this picture is that I used 5 minute epoxy to hold the barrel in place in the reciever of the cannon so it won't spin. Then about 20 minutes later proceeded to fit the muzzle brake through the curved mantlet. Guess what, doesnt fit. After my miniheart attack I relised I hadnt really put any effort into soldering the muzzle brake to the barrel because it had a good pressure fit, so I might be able to worm it back off.. Hazzah for underacheiving, it came back off and I didnt even have to risk reheating it!

I am using the curved mantlet because according to my sources MHN never switched to the chinned mantlet, also according to sources including the AMPS build notes I am referencing, the brackets molded on to the right hand side of the mantlet (other side from what is in photo) should not be there so they have been scraped off.

I hope I survive this kit..

Ya, I can relate to that! I'm just getting my Panther Ausf F back on track after a great friend of mine (Hey Mike!) sent me some drawings from the Jentz book. Seems I had a lot of details wrong. But your build looks great Wulfen, keep plodding!

Hi guys!
I've been redirected here from another post and, wow! you all are doing a great job!

I am particularly awestruck by Andres tutorial on painting figures, a filed in which I am at the beginning of the learnig curve...

I have a question for you Andres: which colours do you use? Acrilycs? Oils?

Thank you
Ciao
Edo

Finished up with all the details I'm going to do before starting the paint work. Tried cropping the pics in Picasa but they didn't seem to upload Anyway first coat of red primer hopefully Monday

Looking really nice Kerry! What brand of primer are you going to use?

Kerry it is good to see this campaign still going strong and with what looks to be a nice build. I do have a question though which is how are you going to get the wheels on with the side skirt attached?

Wulfen-James I'm using a very technical mixture of Model Master Rust and Radome Tan, It's what I have on-hand! I added drops of tan to about 2 Mls of Rust until I was happy with the shade. I know that's not very helpful, sorry!

CMOT-Darren I haven't glued the upper/lower hulls together yet, they're just sitting atop of each other. I thought about that when I took the pictures and wouldn't put it past me to do a bonehead thing like that!

I'm curently playing with the camera settings and should get some pictures up with red primer on. Stay tuned.

Ok, I was able to get some red oxide primer on my beastie last night. Had to replace one of the grills (can you guess???) as it had some glue residue from the removal of the louvers,I had put them in the wrong place!==) The next step is to add the first part of the camo by creating "scattered bricks" with small pieces of Tamiya tape. Then spray on my next color. It's currently raining in my neck of the woods and since my "spray booth" is not environmentally controlled, I'll have to wait for dryer weather.

These questions had to be asked bud

Finally had a chance to try to take some pictures of the finished Panther. It is a lot harder to take pictures of a tank then it is a figure! One of these days I hope to learn how to actually take good pictures, which is quite important being that we share what we do mostly via images online! Anyhow, until then these will have to work.

I'm going to call this finished. Overall I'm quite happy with how it turned out, which means it is more like I had envisioned it to turn out like then not. But being a figure guy it was treading some unknown waters for sure, but it was a ton of fun, and I will be building another model in the near futute. Anyway, here is the finished model along with the last figure.











And the finished model on it's base

Wow! Fantastic looking figure Anders! And the Panther is no slouch either! Your figures capture the complete exhaustion of post combat (been there!), that is some of THE BEST figure painting I've seen, and I know some guys who can do wonders with oils and acrylics. I skimmed over your previous threads and I guess I missed it but what medium do you use for your figure painting? Simply fantastic!

Hi Anders,
I like your figures.Excellent weathering balance on the 'panzergrenadier'.Good job
cheers
Antonio

Thanks a lot Anders! Very nice of you to do us a tutorial.

Phil.

Great finish on your Panther, something that I am still weak on, though having fun learning how to make realistic weathering.

Thanks Kerry, Antonio, Philippe and Trevor! I really appreciate you taking the the time to comment.

Kerry,

Thanks, appreciate those very kind words! I think the figures add an important element to any piece of armor, it can help set the mood of the piece. Figures is what I normally do so I enjoy those quite a bit. This was the first time in many years I did an actual model to go with the figures, which was a ton of fun as well!

As for the paint, I use acrylics for everything. Mostly I use Valejo and Reaper paint, but sometimes I'll use Andrea Miniatures paint as well.

If you scroll back to pack 72 of this thread, I did a small SBS on how I painted the tank commander and the camo tunic on the sleeping driver. There are also more SBS's on my blog (that hasnt been updated for ages...) which can be found at www.andersheintz.blogspot.com

Again, thanks guys for your very warm comments. I will most definitely do another model in the near future!

Hello Anders,

That is a fine Panther and figs right there my man! Just Fabulous!

You attending the Tulsa show next year? Id love to see it there - it would be a real treat for me.

Gary

Hola Gary,

Thank you sir!

As a fellow Texan I hope you will come to the Lone Star Figure Show which will be held here in Dallas March 14-16th, 2013! Last years show was a huge success and it should be even better this year. We do the show just outside of downtown Dallas at a first class venue. Julio Cabos of Andrea Miniatures fame will be attending again this year and do a figure painting workshop as well as John Rosengrant is doing a seminar.

Anyways, you should come and check it out!! It is much more then just a figure show, last year we had a great turn out of all kinds of models!

Hey Anders,

Ah yes...The LoneStar fig show...I was there buddy!!! Great show and i brought home some gongs for armor and a certificate of merit for my 1/16th German Officer - My first 1/16th. You would recognize me if you saw me. Im 6'3" 300pds. bald with a gotee and tattoos...hard to miss! LOL

Ill see ya there man!!!

Gary

Ah right on!! Glad you made it to the show, and apologies for not knowing. It was quite the insane weekend for me, as I was in charge of the whole shebang, it was a bit of a blur at the end!

I knew your name was awefully familiar! I remember faces best, not so much names that go along with faces!!

Managed to get the Dunkelgrun on and the "bricks#2" masked. This second layer of green bricks will intermingle with the masked off red primer "bricks to hopefully create an overlapping pattern. The next step is the Schwarzgrun/Schwarzgrau splinter pattern camo over the whole surface. I hope it works as an urban camo for my Nacht Panther. The Germans had some of the most unusual(and practical)camouflage patterns during WWII in my opinion. This is just a what if camo using hard-edged splinter patterns with "debris" scattered over the top to hide it amongst the city ruins in which it made it's final(hypothetical) stand. Hope you enjoy it.

Hey Kerry your tank is looking great!! Though it does look like it had a shaving accient.. lol. I'm sure once you get all the paint on it, it will be awesome:)


Well I've been working on two parts of the project concurrently, the turret and the rear boxes. I decided to skip to the turret because it looked easier.. foolish me.




So in the things gone wrong department.. I painted 7 cupola periscopes, test fitted one.. and during the test fit it escaped into the wilds.. so now there are 6.

I was putting on the foliage loops.. had no problems at all, got down to the last two and both of them escaped and ran off with the periscope glass.

Lastly I was putting the brass peices on to the tops of the cupola but one wouldnt fit because of the bit of plastic sticking up.. so i tried to notch it.. oops.. and off it went to join to join the others.. so far im not sure what the bit of plastic was supposed to represent, I cant seem to find it in any pictures.. if I need it there I can make one out of green stuff.

The two foliage loops as you can see i tried to remake out of brass wire, unfortuneately I choose a bit of wire that is just a little too thick. But hopefully once painted wont be noticeable.. I think my lesson learned here is to not try working on small parts after Thanksgiving dinner..

I also wasn't able to solder on one of the wingnuts onto the 3 tabs. Some how the hole got filled with solder and i couldnt get it out of the hole and got frustrated with it.. and had a heck of a time getting the other 5 on, mostly due to inexperience, so i called it good at 5 microscopic wingnuts.. I'm probably going to have to find a way to remove scale that wont wipe out the wingnuts while im at it. By the way, could anyone please tell me what those metal plates and the wing nuts are for?

On the rainguard I got confused over which bends were supposed to be at what angles, despite comparing it to the plastic one before bending, luckily i was able to correct it easily






I shaved off the reinforcement peice on the rear lifting loop as from what i could find out they were on tanks made by MAN not MNH. It's a theory anyway As well as cut off a little square bit from the rear hatch door that according to atleast one source is most likely a padlock hasp that MNH tanks didn't have. I left off the AA ring as I want this to be a January production tank. It is possible that the peg also should not be there. I am looking into it.

Currently the cupola and its door are not actually glued into place, they are just sitting there and the periscope glasses are not installed, nor has the bottom been placed on the turret.

As for the instructions for the turret.. they weren't too bad, except trying to figure out the orientation of some of the peices because the orientations of things in the drawings are horrid.

So, there it is.. if anyone sees any other mistakes let me know.. so I can correct them. If i have time tomorrow I'll post the pics of the rear stowage boxes.

So far this tank has been challenging and gratifying to build, it may not be as pretty and perfect as some of the ones before it. But I am enjoying the build and that is all that matters.

Kerry I see an interesting paint job in our future.

James very clean building you have done here I look forward to seeing it finished.

Gents don't forget this 13 month campaign finishes New Years eve and you must upload an image of your finished build into the campaign gallery linked to near the start of this thread. 28 days and counting.

Okay! Time for part 2 of yesterdays post!

@ Darren - Thanks for the reminder

So, todays post is all about stowage boxes woot! Who knew there could be so many lil tiny parts. I actually ended up cheating a little. I used the left rear MNH box from Aber but at the last minute decided the latchs from AM works looked easier to use, I did modify the latch on IR box as well.

As you may recall here are the instructions:




here is the best drawing I could find of what it might should look like:


and here is what I ended up doing:



note that the T is a little crooked. Well..I thought about trying it again, to get it straighter.. but decided I was pushing my luck and was at the edge of my skill with the torch as it was. all the hardware is soldered, but except the hinge wire which is glued. The door is left open a crack as I evenutally have plans to put this tank into a diorama in which the door is being closed. So here are the rest of the pics I took of them:







The boxes arent acutally attatched to the tank yet.. they were both just sitting there posing in that last pic

Oh, and I relised as I was looking at this just now that I forgot to put the loop on the IR box.. gah

Okay I only have 28 days left so off I go to the work bench, post more when I can!!