Here's my finished Panzer IV ausf D,the kit is Dragons quite old 3in1 kit 6265.

Its my first model in nearly 2 years.







Cheers
Karl

You have the dusty look nailed pretty well, what do you use? A couple of things stick out to me.

In the first photo the dust appears to stop at the ring on the hull to protect the turret gap.

In the second picture... the spare track.. it looks spotless. On a tank that dusty it would be well just as dusty.

The muffler, you need to blacken the inside of the pipe even darker than the out side.

And finally you might want to hit the inner set of road wheels to make the match the outer set.


All that said this is still a very nice looking dusty PZ IV!! (and I am still wondering how you did such a nice looking dust) Great work for the first one in two years.

Nice work. You hit the dusty look on the head. I notice, in the last photograph, the right hand tracks are coming apart. I like the addition of the jerry cans.

Welcome back to the darkside, Karl! Pretty nice finish on this one, especially after a 2 year break.

A few suggestions on things I noticed. Some are minor and can easily be remedied, if you'd like to do them. First, the head pads on the turret hatch were made from leather. They wouldn't be painted grey. Second, you missed painting the 4 little lenses of the convoy light on the left rear fender. And third, the ends of the chains on the rear smoke discharger caps were attached to the discharger body, they didn't just hang free. They were meant to keep the caps from getting lost. Speaking of those chains, they seem to be too heavy for use there. Finally, I'm just going to assume the front spare links were recently added to the tank as they aren't near as dusty as the rest of the vehicle (as good as explanation as any).

There is one thing you'll just have to watch out for in the future. In the last picture you can see a bad misalignment of the track links on the right. It probably happened when you were installing the tracks and is actually a pretty common problem with indie-links.

HTH

Good-looking, well-dusted D!

Overall, you have done a great job here, IMHO. Other folks have ID'd a number of tiny fixes - and addressing them will add a bit of pop to a nice build. You could also add some dust to that small muffler on top of the big can... that's the early-style exhaust for the small aux motor used to rotate the turret, and dust would surely accumulate there as elsewhere. Also... unlike the main engine exhaust, that aux motor was a small engine which ran occasionally and that little exhaust probably did not "burn" nor rust near as much as did the main.

PS: AFV Bob mentioned those chains hanging on the smoke-bomb box... yes, they really look too big! The real chain was generally a very small wire-link item - it was connected to the box adjacent to each bomb-cylinder, and to the pull-ring on the bomb. The actual bomb, or canister, was the Nebelkerze 39-b, which is a can with a small pull-match inside and a pull-ring on top, and sometimes another larger ring or loop used to hang that bomb inside of the rack / box. The rack (one of 3 designs) was a box set up to drop these canisters so that gravity would do the "pull work". The chain pulled the ring and fuse and set the bomb alight as it dropped out of the box behind the tank. These bombs got very hot and posed a fire-hazard, and were dropped free of the moving tank (sometimes to the immediate dismay of closely-following troopies...).

Troops were issued the same canisters to be tossed by hand.

So... either the chains should be looped and attached to the bomb and to the edge of the cylinder (or a point close by on the under side of the box or its inner frame), or the chains can indeed dangle - but no bombs would be in that box in this case. You, and others (even myself) might consider adding a small ring with a tiny stick - the pull-ring and match - to the bottom of the dangling chain.

Here's how the box and bombs look - sketch-pic obtained from website and posted here for discussion purposes only.

Depending on the box-type, the box either tilted and dumped the bombs out (early boxes) or the bombs hung on hooks on a cam inside the top of the box (later) and were dropped when the cam turned. Both types released by cable from inside - or a trooper outside could pull the bomb out and set it off.
IF the crew dropped them, it was "all or nothing".



PS: I'm guilty of this leaving bombs in with chains a-dangle, too!

PS2: I THINK that the little brass "cups" included in some PE kits are actually meant to be the small base-cup the bomb stood in when it was inside of a box-type that tilted to drop bombs. But maybe NOT part of a box where bombs were hung on a cam w/ hooks?

Bob

See this is why it's always best to post your builds and find out mistakes.Even after 10 years or more of modelling I still can make mistakes

To tell you the truth I was in 2 minds of repainting it but it would of been too much of a head ache.

I shall address some of the issues you guys have pointed out and never noticed the right hand track,must of been when I installed them as I can't paint tracks when they are installed on the model I paint and weather them off the tank.

Thanks for all your feed back and the time you have taken to point out some of the issues.

Now I can get on with my Mid tiger and make sure I do a better job

Kind regards
Karl

Karl,

Looks like intensive summer campaigning c. 1940! Good work.

I stand corrected.

I hate trying to bend these, correctly. The easy fix is, of course to make them spent.

There ARE actual chains which are fairly close in size - 42 links / US inch.

The PE "chains" are an un-royal PITA, but if you have real awesome, unworldly even, levels of patience and perseverance, you can use 2 pairs of needle-point pliers or tweezers and twist each "link" a little from its neighbors to get a 3-d "chain", and use those same pliers/tweezers to bend the gawd-awful bit into a loop... it's all blah , but it does work and it does look OK when done.

Or... you get a 42-link chain and get hangin'!

But remember... dangle means dropped... I know, I'm guilty of quietly skipping over that detail, too!

FWIW: A Tamiya Pz II - C with them little dangly real chains (and bombs still tucked up in there...)



Cheers!

Bob

Bob the chain I used was a 40 link per inch smallest I could get.

I should of said about the dust,I used AK light dust fixed with mig pigment fixer and sprayed a light coat of Vallejo flat.

Karl, an ideal source of really fine chain is jewelry. Check out any local junk stores, rummage sales, or crafts oriented stores. All you need to find is one or two necklaces worth of fine chain and you'll be set for quite a while.