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Building a Leichter Panzertriebwagen!

Construction
The upper and lower hull are furnished with an approximately 8mm high resin-chunk which has to be removed. For the upper hull it is not that difficult because the chunk is as wide as the side armor. The lower hull is a troublemaker, because the chunk is covering the complete inner side of it but it has to be removed, as otherwise the parts will not fit together. There is only one solution: grab 3 sheets of water resistant sandpaper, corn 50; open the windows; pull over your dust mask; put on the gloves (some parts are rather sharp) and start removing the chunk by slowly rotating the part over the wet sandpaper. I tried removing the chunk of the upper hull with a fret-saw, but destroyed some details which had to be rebuilt, therefore I would recommend the a.m. method for this section too. Before I continued with construction I washed the parts to remove the dust.

When gluing upper and lower hull together it is essential to take care of the exact trim, as each inaccuracy will puzzle you in the next step, the construction of the coupling. They consist of resin and etched parts (can be compared in quality to the brass coloured Eduard etched parts). Care has to be taken to distinguish between the real part and the chunk, so that removing a “good” part is prevented. Referring to the instruction gives helpful assistance. During construction the trim has to be constantly monitored to grant a satisfying result.

Next are the mufflers. Here the troubles with all parts on one resin base become evident. First of all it is necessary to cut the base in pieces as otherwise the parts cannot be handled/removed. Having customized slices on hand the next obstacle appears. Each part has a casting which is as long as the part itself. Normally the casting covers only a small part of an item, if possible located at a side which is invisible after gluing it on. Already the removing of the rather big and compact mufflers caused damage to them and caused me to glue, fill and sand to get the parts in shape again. Subsequently I discovered that some tools were molded incompletely and 2 of the 3 MG’s were also unusable due to insufficient molding. It is obvious that reproducing the parts that way is easy for the manufacturer but difficult for the modeler.

Adding the mufflers is vague. The instruction did not explain anything like location, direction, also the frame had no marks where to add them. I tried to sort this out by referring to pictures of the real thing. What really annoyed my was the fact to glue on the mufflers without any support, as I think it did not happen on the real vehicle this way. As I could not find an indication on pictures of the real thing I gave up and added the mufflers “the Russian way”.