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Marder I 7.5cm Pak.40/1

"Houston We Have A Problem" I closed up one end of the tracks one side and the other side came up short five links when building the other end section. I never damaged any links and found the two links I dropped on the floor so what happened???????? The instructions call for 107 links per side so I counted the number of links on the sprue tree and it turns out to be 108 in total. The only thing I can figure is I built the tracks to tight making it require more links than provided or the instructions are wrong and more links are required to Get-R-Done. Never Fear! I remember I had a set of Fruil Tracks in the stash.

When comparing the RPM, you can see that the Panda has more detail added. The muffler/silencer cover which is photo tech on the Panda, is thick plastic on the RPM. The Panda has tools. And the armor shield is thinner and has crisper detail. The fighting compartment walls are separate panels on the RPM while the Panda is a one piece shell. The grab handle holes on the RPM are huge so I filled those and needed to re-drill them.

In between rain, I got some painting done after all. Remember I said a tow cable is not supplied in the kit? So, I made one. Once the base paint was down, a filter was applied to smooth things out. After the filter dried a clear sealer was applied and then the decals were placed. I couldn't find the name of the decal manufacture anywhere but other than being a little on the thick side they are well indexed and laid down on the model surface really well with the aid of a decal setting solution. Once dry I sealed them up with another clear coat and moved on to whipping this Marder into shape. It would have been a lot easier to cut the decal and placed the color bars in the right order but my head was up and locked making the correction more complicated. With the marking on and the tracks finally installed, I can call this one done!

This is honestly an excellent kit by Panda Hobby and in my opinion can be built by most if not all modelers. As mentioned earlier in the build I added the tow cable, jack, extra ammo and head light. The supplied track links were replaced with aftermarket tracks because I ran short of three or four links, and not because I lost them, but may have just assembled them to tight. My Thanks go out to Panda and the Armorama crew for allowing me the chance to build the Marder I 7.5cm Pak.40/1 ausf. Gw.Lr.s.(f) Sd.Kfz.135 for the Kitmaker Network