OK, I've finally been able to get some work done and shall here present what has been going on.
Turning the chassis over I fixed the rear bed area into place and while this was setting I turned my attention to the six seats that go into the rear bed, each one is made up of three parts, the base and seperate back and bottom cushions. Strangely the bottom cushion will only fit one way which has a fair chunk projecting over the front edge, to my mind the way they should fit involves some surgery to the sides of the cushion for it to fit into the base, this involved cutting off fairly large chunks using a pair of sprue cutters then filing down til they fit. Once the cushions were altered they all received the micropore tape treatment. Here are the seats with the chassis & rear compartment.
The seats themselves are being added later once the rear area is complete as I want to be sure of space and that everything is nice and smooth.
Next up are the side and rear panels and as can be seen from the next pic are in need of some work before they get glued in place.
Not only are there knock-out marks galore there are also four protrusions on the inside of the rear plate that will need removing and all traces of being made to disappear, the removal is easy, just clip them off with the sprue cutters before sanding and filling as required, once again superglue and Bicarb did their duty for the filling.
I had noticed that during the removal of the moulded in treadplate detail I had damaged the surface of the two wheel wells/stowage boxes so to restore the smoothness I broke out the Mr Surfacer and using a brush I applied enough to fill the scratches and account for any shrinkage during drying, while I was at it I also went over a couple of the CA/Bicarb filled holes as I had spotted a couple of minor imperfections with the filling and left it to dry. It was at this point I also filled in the mounting holes for all the tools as well as those for the headlight guards which will be replaced with much finer PE ones, again this was done with CA/bicarb and once sanded any imperfections fixed with Mr Surfacer.
This next pic shows the two side panels in place along with the radiator and also the filled and sanded lightguard mounts.
I then moved onto the engine compartment panels, these get replacement handles and latches from the PE set so once the moulded in bits are removed these are added, also at this point the mounts for the jerry can rack each side are made and fixed in place, refering to the pics in Panzerwrecks 3 the actual racks themselves are missing so only the base plates were required.
The left side panel.
Turning my attention back to the rear plate which was fixed into place once I'd sorted out the mounting holes for the rear bumper, with this done it was glued into position, even before I did this I realised I'd have to do some serious gap filling to make the joint look realistic, this was done using the gap filling properties of Mr Surfacer which once dry was carefully scraped back.
The rear plate in place.
As the sides of the engine compartment were already done these were then fixed into place and I also dryfitted the bonnet, to get this to fit I had to sand the top edge of the firewall down about a millimetre across its full width, I'm not sure if this is a moulding fault or just my own but with that done the bonnet fitted almost perfectly as seen here.
Next up was the unditching roller at the front (the Airfix kit mis-labels this as a winch.
) which was assembled without any problems just a couple of small knockout marks which were dealt with by Mr S once again. When I tested the armoured radiator cover I noticed a huge gap all the way around between it and the bonnet/side panels, to rectify this I glued some 1mm square strip along the three sides and left that to dry before sanding/trimming to fit.
The last part of the front is the two bumpers that are either side of the roller, these are replaced with etch parts and once in place look like this.
