Okay, time to tackle my next project! Trumpeter's E-50. I love the look of the tank and the kit is fairly good but AMS compels me to add some aftermarket.



I wanted the different turret because it will be in a diorama with a Panther F and it would both be nice to not have identical turrets and the Trumpeter one suffers in comparison to the Dragon turret.

And no to start on the suspension.



The fit is OK, sizable gaps and mismatches to be filled with Mr Dissolved Putty (This and Mr Surfacer 500 are true gifts to plastic modelers!). I'm not going to go too crazy making them perfect since they'll be hidden behind roadwheels and tracks.



They are handed, so I use a Sharpie marker to keep track of them.



And glue the suspension units on.



Fit is OK but a small amount of Mr Dissolved Putty applied and then scraped back and forth so capillary action sucks it into the gaps was needed, followed by sanding.



Roadwheel arms glued on (which was foolish!) and holes in the idler mount filled and sanded.




Prepped roadwheels showed me the error of my ways. The mount is loose and short, so getting these lined up after painting the things and installing the tracks is going to suck!



What I should have done was glue the wheels to the arms and left them unattached. The mounting to the springs on the hull is tight could hole without glue. I'd advise anyone building the kit to do it that way and not follow the instructions. I used a spare roadwheel unit to illustrate what I SHOULD have done. . .




More later,
Matt

Hi Matt!
I´m working on a completely different approach to the E-50, more in the line of the E-50 Ausf.M version of World of Tanks game. That means rear drive pack and a larger turret to give more space inside for the gun trunnions and achieve better depression angle for it...
Talking about Dragon´s Panther F, if it is the old Dragon one don´t be too confident on its turret if you expect some degree of "accuracy", as it was widely mentioned to be almost completely fictional in its measurements and size...
If it´s the Cyber Hobby "2 in 1" kit, I´ve read that the turret was corrected and compares well to the drawings in Panzer Tracts, but didn´t have one of this kits in my hands so cannot give a personal opinion about it.
Just my 2cts here
Will follow your progress with attention

You know, I was seriously considering going that route myself and had downloaded their blueprints. Ultimately though, I didn't want to spend that long on the modifications. I agree on the original panther -F turret but fortunately I have the 2 in 1 kit, which has a really nicely done turret (and most everything on it, actually!). I'm hoping to run some tests on using brushed on metalizer for the armor texture and then get to work on the rear hull.

Matt

Work continues. I'm planning on pulling some parts, as well as the transport tracks, from Dragon's final production King Tiger kit. On that note, one thing that I like that Trumpeter did was to commit on the suspension to a front drive sprocket and not give the idler teeth.

Anyway, started working on the Real Models turret. Filled in some of the texture and grafted on the housing for the Trumpeter/RB 88mm gun. Required some brief resin removal with the Dremel.



It overlaps a little so I will be filling it in with Epoxy putty and building up some welds with stretched sprue.



Added texture by rebumping along with a small round burr in the Dremel, followed by stippling with Mr Surfacer 500.




Still need to knock it down with some sanding. I was originally going to replace the cupola with the Trumpeter one but, since it won't fit without a lot of building up with putty, I will probably just leave it and insert vision blocks from the outside.

Matt

Clicking along, now with the hull assembled. I textured the armor plates and will be lightly stippling with Mr Surfacer next. The fit was quite good, with only a few gaps underneath the sponsons and at the front join edge of the hull. I will probably end up harvesting less from the King Tiger kit than I expected, the Trumpeter detail compares pretty favorably to the Dragon quality and if anything Trumpeter's welds are nicer.





Matt

So working on the turret now. I Dremelled out the plugged cupola periscope housing.



One issue with the resin turret is the uneven casting on the bottom, along with a hull opening plug that doesn't really match with the hull




Since I'd like the turret to rotate, I decided to mount the kit's turret ring piece to the resin turret.



This involved a ton of Dremmeling of the resin to shrink the plug and dig a recess into the turret resin. A good filter mask is a must!




However, the kit piece now fits.






I also sanded the bottom of the turret down about a mm and sanded the kit part down by about half to make the height fit. I probably need to take out a little more resin to minimize the gab between turret and hull but that will be a matter of test fitting over and over. That said, the turret is starting to come together.

Really good progress so far, its interesting the way the Germans reverted to external suspension for the E-50 abandoning the torsion bar approach of the Tiger I, II and Panther

S

Great job so far.. I could be wrong,But i thin u have the gun mantlet upside down..

It does look that way, doesn't it? According to the drawings in Jentz's Panther book, it really does look that way. Kinda weird but at least it's different.

Good job so far! I'm following your work with this model with great interest.
By the way, I always guessed how much could the gun depress with that roof shape, and where would the tank commander hide before each shot...LOL
Let us know how the KT tracks fit on this girl. I intend to use the "late" tracks on mine.

Thanks for sharing. Looks great so far!

Jim

Hope you had a mask on! Nice work so far!

I double that comment on the tracks! I have the kit but will probably use it on a Campaign and do some other stuff to it since it is a PP.

The kits tracks are not too bad but some metal would be better!










~ Jeff

Yeah, I'm replacing them with the ones from the Dragon Ardennes Tiger. More of a pain than Fruil's but I get a free KT kit thrown in for the same price!

Matt

Photos to come, but the rear plate is just about finished. One thing that I have been consistently surprised by is how many really nice detail touches Trumpeter put in. The exhaust pipes have some really nice PE in a pipe end ring that has that small inner dividing tube and a ring shaped plate that reproduces the bolts on top of the pipe junction. One thing I hadn't noticed is that Trumpeter actually molded credible tool clasps on the tools, not that much clunkier than the ones Dragon has done. Which incidentally calls for a shout-out to Dragon's very nice aftermarket OVM German tool sets which are a huge improvement over most kit tools if you don't want to sand the amorphous blobs off kit tools to add PE clamps. The other thing that hits me is that I actually am a damned microsurgeon and some of these Voyager parts make me feel like I have 10 thumbs. I have consistently wondered if I should bring the kit to work and just do it under a 65x operating microscope. The parts are very nice, don't get me wrong, but I have to question detail parts that are so small that without magnification you literally cannot see them clearly. That said, replacing the clamp on the jack block, for example, is a pretty significant detail improvement. Just wish they'd gone Alliance Modelwork's way and included resin replacements so I didn't have to Dremel and sand the parts before adding PE.

Matt