Hi there,
My first time posting here on the Forum.
I built many military kitsets in the 1970's & 80's but more recently I've been focusing on motor racing.

A few weeks back I bought an old Matchbox kit of the Panther Tank. I'm not sure if I built this kit in my early days of modelling but I know I had many others from the same series. Since buying this kit I've discovered that Revell reissued some of the original Matchbox kits so I've picked up a few of those to do as well.

As well as coming with diorama bases, the box art on the original issue Matchbox kits made these a real favourite of mine.


The kit was pretty basic of course so I made up a few extra parts.


The kit also included a strange little tree which I replaced with my own strange little tree.


The decal/painting options were for Italy '43 & Normandy '44. A bit of research suggested that Italy '43 wasn't an option for an Ausf-G so did my own thing as far as colours and markings.


I'm looking forward to doing some more of these great little kits in the future.

Cheers,
Malcolm

Welcome to the forum Malcolm. You have done a very nice work on the Panther. Im too a big fan of the old Matchbox/Airfix/ESCI kits, I guess due to nostalgia ?! Looking forward to Your next project.

Welcome to Armorama Malcolm. Nice build and additions especially for the scale. Yes, those Matchbox kits do bring back memories. I've started the hobby with their aircraft kits before moving to armor. We had a couple of Matchbox armor campaigns here in the recent years, hopefully #3 comes up soon. You may want to watch out for that. In any case, do forward to your builds! Cheers, Tat

Thanks for the positive feedback. As I said in my opening post it's been a long time since I've attempted something like this.

The Dark Yellow/Desert Yellow mix was airbrushed then the Dark Green/Field Grey mix & Red Brown were hand painted (all Tamiya enamels). I was a little worried at this point as the hand painted colours were noticeably more glossy than the airbrushed Dark Yellow.
I applied the decals at this point.

The colours were also very contrasty, especially due to the hard edges from hand painting. So to blend things together and reduce the sheen I heavily diluted some Desert Yellow (probably 5:1 thinners to paint) and very gradually airbrushed 'dusted' the model. Magically the colour tones merged and the matt finish reappeared and I was really pleased with the result.

With some brown washes and a little highlighting things improved even more.

The tracks were supplied molded in black rubbery plastic. I painted them Metallic Grey then again 'dusted' them with a more concentrated mix of Desert Yellow. Due to the nature of the plastic some of the paint flaked off when fitting the tracks to the model but this was easy enough to touch up.

The wheels were all painted and 'washed' while still on the sprues. Much easier to handle this way.

Making the tools etc was pretty fiddly. The tracks were 12x rectangles of plastic, sandwiched together with double sided tape, then held in a vice to saw the slots. With a bit of tweaking I paired up the track links and added the lugs. They're pretty rough but painted up they don't look too bad.

The tools are made from bits of wire and scrap plastic. The straps that hold the tools to the tank hull are made from label paper, the stuff you feed into your printer if you want to print labels. Cut into thin strips then placed sticky side down, very easy to work with. I also made the ribs on top of the front track guards the same way.

I think a Matchbox/Revell Sherman Firefly might be next. (the one that is driving up a bridge to nowhere). I'll do mine as a 4th New Zealand Armoured Brigade vehicle.

Cheers,
Malcolm

I remember building lots of these as a kid, the Jagdpanther, Monty's caravan, Wespe and Firefly amongst others. The bases were great and the box art was always that little bit more lurid than Airfix.

Nice work on the old matchbox kit.

Seems you had a lot of fun!


Cheers Daniel

Nice clean camo job! Did you mask?

No I didn't mask this one. I did think about it but then decided to hand paint the darker colours with a brush. I used Tamiya enamels which I find (when mixed well) give good coverage from a thin coat.
Airbrushing a heavily diluted final coat of Desert Yellow blended it all together nicely.

Cheers,
Malcolm

You're right that Italy '43 was out, but '44 and '45 would have been fine,

Awesome work Malcolm.
I love these old Matchbox armour kits and recently acquired a bunch of them. We really need another Matchbox campaign.

Old memory coming back!

Well done.