This is coming along swimmingly... I have a lot of the PPP items too, beautifully cast I must say. Wonderful work so far!

On the chassis -- Trumpeter's entire E50/75 series of kits -- I'm of the opinion they screwed up not understanding tank engineering in general. For starters, I feel all the wheels stations should have at least be fitted with double wheels a la the Panther II, E100, and Tiger II chassis. To me there is no way the tonnage being reported for this chassis series (the E75 would likely have topped 90-tons fully loaded) can survive long in the field on a single thin disc wheel per axle...the wheel bearings alone would have to be magically impressive to handle such stresses as Trumpeter has designed it.

I brought this up to John at PPP and we were in general agreement. Trumpeter's arrangement only looks superficially correct from direct side view as they likely only had that Panzer Tract volume as ref. The suspension also sits way too high on these kits, by how much I don't know exactly, but I've been lowering my kits like a good SoCal car guy should.

Hi, Michael- I AGREE with you 100% regarding TRUMPETER's screwing-up their renditions of the E50/E75 fragile-looking suspension and single-wheel-per-axle. In 1:1 scale, the weight of the tank' hull, turret, etc, would collapse the suspension, unless this paper panzer was truly made out of paper!