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Recycling Your Old Kits

The most fun was disassembling the kit. It went straightforward as the glue was already weak and the parts skipped off easily.
 Only the upper and lower hull and the running gear remained. I sawed out the roof of the fighting compartment and replaced it with a roof from a Tamiya Stug IV, which I got (built and heavily painted!!) from a friend. During cutting the side amour of the StugIII broke on both sides as over the past years the softeners in the plastic disappeared. Gluing those parts together, adding the new roof and using squadrons red stuff as filler made the Stug appear very weird. It reminded me on an article about a Jaguar E-Type which had been welded together from parts of two cars.

Next was the running gear. Obviously to avoid problems while performing motorized action Tamiya has chosen to enlarge the wide of the tracks and subsequently the wide of all wheels involved. To make the Dragon tracks fit and to make the running gear look more accurate I had to shorten the distance between the front and rear part of the wheels, which was rather easy by sawing the access off over a template. I also wanted to hollow out the holes in the rims but then discovered, that this was very tricky item. I also was shocked when I compared an Italeri wheel with it’s delicate look to the clumsy and inaccurate Tamiya wheel. At least the diameter was OK and the rest would be covered by mud anyway, so I did not spend any more efforts on the wheels. The idler wheel was no problem too, only the drive sprocket was a nasty item to shorten. I also had to reduce it’s teeth as they did not fit in the tracks.

I scratched the track adjustment and towing device used on late Stug’s at the rear. I also shortened the axles so that I could add the shortened wheels.