I find I plug away, and once all the pesky mods are done, the project just races ahead.
Occasionally for my morale, and sanity, I have a crack at a kit that just "flies together" so I can get in to the mindset of actually finishing something.
The Germans had some interesting armour, but I tend to shy away from it because I think it is represented way out of proportion to its significance and numbers (I'm sure there are more different Tiger 1s on the market than what there were real vehicles!).
However, when Trumpeter released their Sturer Emil, it was a kit I just had to have. It looked to be superbly engineered, the price was right and I had just finished Antony Beevor's excellent book about Stalingrad. You'll never see me building a "paper Panzer", but for me the two Sturer Emils summed up the insanity of the Nazi invasion of Russia.
The kit had sat on my shelf in the shed, along with a few hundred others, for about the past three years, and the other night I was taking a break from a magazine editing job with a glass of wine in hand when I started to tinker with it.
The kit was indeed well engineered, and in no time I had the lower hull tub, superstructure and gun together.
I did a bit of research, and there is a plethora of updates for this kit, but I just wanted to get in to a "no brainer build", and, besides, the interior looked nicely busy as it came out of the box, and some of the photo etch seemed ridiculous (I didn't feel like removing the water bottle straps and replacing them with brass strip).
I though the gun was well done, although the multi piece breech block took a bit of cleaning up:
I agonised about how I would gonfigure the components, and decided to cut off the mounting shaft for the gun, and replace it with a bit of plastic tube slid in to gun through a hole I drilled in the cruciform base in the superstructure, which I chose to fit before painting. This way the gun could be fully assembled, slid in, and held in place with the tube.
As I said, I though the interior was nicely busy out of the box, and I find that many "super" interior details tend to be barely visible once the vehicle is assembled:
I had a spray can ot Tamiya German grey, which has made the basic build fly ahead without even getting an air brush dirty! After masking, I gave the interior a coat of grey and then a squirt of dullcote once the paint dried:
You can see here how I modified the mounting system for the gun:
As much as it looked like a cavernous hole, the inside of the superstructure starts to get crowded when the gun is mounted:
Anyway, I'll let the dullcote harden and give the interior a wash in a week or two before picking out some details and dry brushing. I have seen on other builds that people think that because the slats on the floor are probably wood, they should be brown, which makes about as much sense as painting the exterior of the vehicle silver because it is made of steel. The wooden slats were painted grey, like the rest of the vehicle interior:
There will be only minimal upgrades to the base vehicle. I've read the kit gun is way underscale, and since the almost ridiculously big gun is such a feature, I will look around for a replacement barrel. The rubber band tracks are nice enough, but I don't think I'll be able to get the distinctive sag from them, so I will take a look at the Hobby Boss replacements.
Apparently one of these vehicles was destroyed and the other was captured at the fall of Stalingrad. I can only imagine that it sat forlorn in the rear for weeks and months due to lack of fuel and especiialy its unique type of ammunition. No doubt the vehicle would have been stripped of every item of useful equipment, and since mine has all its stores in place, I reckon I'll depict it early in its career in the warmer weather on the wide open steppes during the advance to Stalingrad.
I found a picture which suggests that although these vehicles left the factory in a standard Panzer Grey, at least one of them got a mottling of what appears to be some type of green:
So far I have enjoyed the build and the Trumpeter Sturer Emil is a classic 1/35th kit in my book. Even if you're not in to German armour - like me - look at grabbing this kit, because it is great value.
I'll report in again when I detail the interior and mount the gun and superstructure.
