I am enlisted to this campaign from the very beginning but I've never shown what I would like to build. And here it is - the T.A.C.A.M-2 an Romanian tank destroyer. It is a second TACAM in this campaign. I will start in next month probably. I will use bronco's morserzugmittel as a base and some remains from CMK's TACAM-2. The gun's barrel is from RB or Aber. Other gun's parts are from Mini Art.

After quite a while I resumed working on this model. I applied the paint base coat made of Field Grey, NATO Black and Flesh. The missiles are painted NATO Green with some Flesh to have some variety in the green tones.





Olivier

some progress with SU-85:



I'll have to attach some small parts before I can start painting. And remove paper from tracks...

Love the colour Oliver.

Looking great too Pasi.

Very nice work Olivier and Pasi!

Marek, that looks like an interesting project!

getting close to the finish line.

i have used the rubber band tracks as it just wasn't working our with the link and length ones that come with the kit. they have been painted and weathered and installed to the model. just need to add all the accessories and grebils now.

Looking good David. Just as a matter of interest, I was browsing the list of active campaigns, and this one has the highest number of enlisted participants, so well done in running such a popular campaign.

Raj,

Love the paint job but how did you manage to resist for 43 minutes? Your intestinal fortitude shames us mortals!!

Cheers,
Rick

I have some SU-100 build progress to report.

Soldered all spare boxes and added their mounts & bolts.
Managed to mount MiniArt's late T-34 wheels on Zvezda hull.I had to rotate them- mount their inner side outside- so I'll need to undertake some surgery on the wheel hub caps.
MiniArt's drive sprockets are also mounted, but MiniArt's idler wheels fit too loose on Zvezda's idler arms, so I need to come out with a solution.
RB Models barrel needed some reinforcement around the mounting lug to fit tight enough into gun mask.Used some styrene tubes and CA and now it sits firm where it should be.
I decided I'll use Zvezda's smoke cannisters and side fuel tanks, but will build their supports/brackets from brass/copper sheet- the plastic parts are either wrong, or missing detail.First 2 side fuel tank brackets were built, there are 6 more to go.
I further decided I'll replicate the rain cover guard of gun mask from copper sheet.Using some Tamiya masking paper, I copied the shapes of the plastic rain cover guard, cut it from copper sheet and soldered it.As I intend to have the rain cover guard movable, I've added 2 Voyager piano hinges.

Some pictures:





Take care all!
And keep up the good work,

Nice work on the Jagdtiger David. Love the camo. So little of the tracks are visible, you can get away with the band ones.

Angel, just gets better and better., but why not just build the whole thing from scratch...

I made some progress on the Stug this afternoon.

I completed the hull including adding the little caps on the torsion bars inside the hull. Why? I do not know....



But all the suspension parts are attached. There are a couple of things that puzzle me about the instructions. They want you to build the drive sprockets and add them to the drive housing before you attach the housing to the hull. I just attached the housing to the hull and left the drive sprockets off. I hope to be able to paint them independently. Same thing for the track-tensioners behind the idlers. Again I just added the track-tensioners and left the idlers off. But more on that in a minute.

I spent most of the time sanding the road wheels and the return rollers. Here they all are:



I'll hit them with a coat of primer and then double check the sanding. I did them first. Sanding road wheels is the one thing I hate about armor modeling. It's good to do that first so you can enjoy the rest of the build.

This dragon kit is very interesting. I've heard criticisms about it in that it's hard to figure out exactly what you are building. If you follow the instructions about which parts to use I guess you get a mish-mash of parts from different factories and different times. But, if you have something you are trying to build, it seems to have parts for it. Looking at my picture, it has the sprockets with hubcaps on them, so I substituted that part for the one given in the kit instructions. And I used the rubber return rollers as the metal ones came a little later than my subject. I've identified a few more changes, one of which you'll see in the next pic. I'm not sure about the photo-etched inserts in the idler wheels. I've seen builds of DML stugs on YouTube where those rings are a single part. In this kit you have three arcs you need to blue together to make a circle. I wasn't sure so just glued them end-to-end. They don't really line up with the edge of the wheel so I centered them as best I could and glued them on....

I added the rear plate to the hull before gluing the parts on it.



The instructions call for adding all the parts to the rear plate, adding the track-tensioners to the hull, then slipping the rear plate onto the track-tensioners. I sort of fooled around with that before putting anything together and couldn't figure out how that would ever work. There are vertical plates connecting the rear plate to the hull that are too big to snap into place I think. So I attached the rear plate to the hull then glued all the parts on. It's fine but it's hard for me to work upside-down (which you really need to do because of the hull overhang).

My reference, Muller and Zimmerman, says there should be a hatch for servicing the tensioning lever of the ventilator V-belt. The kit has the part but it's left off the instructions, so I added it. Interestingly the instructions don't say to remove the locating pins for it if you're not using it.

Fit on everything so far has been fine. There's a fair bit of clamping involved on both ends of the hull to tighten everything up. I think I have one small gap on the drive sprocket housing to fill but that's it so far.

Thanks Peter!
Next time I'll have it built entirely from scratch- promissed!

The various accessories have been painted, the decals (3) have been applied. I also highlighted most of the raised details and I will soon apply a pinwash to enhance the details.







Olivier

After a bit of weathering. At least a bit more than what I intended to do








Olivier

David, thanks for the nice compliment.Hope Dillon is doing better.
Your Jagtiger looks great. I like the camo paint scheme.
Chuck, thanks for the nice comment.
Norman, your M-10 is looking terrific. The turret detail is
very realistic.
Shell, thanks. It's always fun to revisit builds from our youth.
Oliver, thank you for the nice comment.
Angel, wonderful job on your kit. The Czech only details are
interesting. Love the thin copper fenders.
David, weathering on your Jagtiger looks realistic.
Angel, a workable engine grill....Wow! The details keep piling
up.
Raj, cool Braille scale Jagpanther kit. I like your camo scheme.
Phil, nice Stug and photo for the campaign. Good luck!
Marek, great idea kit bashing a TACAM 2. Enjoy!
Oliver, it's always exciting to see the first paint go on a
build. Nice variations of green.
Pasi, the build of your Su-85 is looking great.
David, the Jagtiger is awesome!!!
Angel, you are putting an incredible amount of detail work into
your Su-100. It qualifies as a multi media build with all
the metal on it.
Phil, your Stug build is progressing nicely. Have fun!
Oliver, great job! Some detail painting, a few decals, and your
model has a unique character to it.

Wonderful works everyone. Good luck to all. Bill

Update on my 1/48 Bandai Hetzer.

Finished the upper, inside, hull detailing. Added gun sight, MG periscope, driver's station, and side wall ammo storage.

Also completed the main gun detailing. Added gun sight tracking armature, top of gun cylinder details, and breach opening detail.

Thanks for viewing. Good luck to all on their builds. Bill

Thanks William. Pity a lot of the interior will be hidden by the crew. M-10 now been gloss coated and the decals added. Will post updated photos in the next few days. The Hetzer is looking very good.

William, hat interior on your 1/48 bandai hetzer looks fabulous and i can't wait to see more work soon.

little Dillon is on the mend albeit my vet bill is past the £700 ($840) mark.

as for the Jagdtiger i was working on it is now finished i just need to find time to take some decent pictures of it.

As mentioned above updated pics are attached.

The decals, particularly the large one on the front required some encouragement from Micro sol and Micro set to settle down.

Now working on the crew and stowage prior to weathering.

Brilliant job on the Hetzer. It's a shame most of it will remain invisible in the end.

Olivier

I don't know, Oliver....

Opening up the whole left side is going to create quite a vista, I think! Just looking at the arrangement and progress as it now stands, I can't help but think of this as being a bit like something that one sees on one of those "storage wars" shows, where the storage company cuts the locks and opens up the abandoned storage room for viewing by the bidders... The bidders can't go inside, but you can get an enticing one-sided view of the pile inside.

You can't actually see everything done, perhaps, but you will see A LOT, and your imagination will be hugely fueled as you envision there being other neat bits waiting behind the up-front stuff and lurking just barely glimpsed at the rear edges and shadows!

Williams effort looks like it will be an awesome little finish!

This project and approach engenders some thinking by me on opportunities provided by subjects to show and see the interiors of AFV. Seems to me that the "unibody" "Hetzer" is perhaps a nearer-to-ideal subject, compared to most AFV, specially turreted types, as one can cut away a big side panel and actually get a huge view of an interior. For many AFV, the hull "free-board" above fenders and track-runs and such is actually rather short or thin - think of most "popular" tanks: German WWII Pz III, IV, Panthers, Tigers, Russian KV-1 and T-34, and virtually all post-war and modern tanks. And turreted AFV design "geometry" further complicates things by placing engines rather separated (good for crew, tough for modelers making cut-aways) and thus tougher to show in a shared view-cut. This means that doing hull-side cut-aways above the fender / track-line often cannot provide very large viewing windows. And turret-side cut-aways may be similarly limited, specially on more-modern tanks, where turrets have lower profiles. And removing the tops for down-views of course challenges one with how to keep top-side exterior details - often the more-interesting stuff on an armor build - intact while providing a interior view. And of course peeking thru small hatches is really limiting... This has been an ongoing frustration to me, starting with detailing-up interiors of tiny Pz.I and small Pz.38 kits, where there is huge potential and available stuff to do great interiors, but hard to actually open those up to see what you've done inside!

So, the Hetzer and its similars may offer rather neat cut-away opportunities where you may get to more-readily engineer larger and more-revealing interior views - while actually being able to leave large amounts of the exterior top and sides intact to keep that ambiance of the "whole thing".

Just an observation and thought, after seeing the tiny Hetzer progress!

Cheers! Bob

I've made some progress.

I've started on the superstructure:



Finished the front and rear hull decks:



And was chugging along on the fenders when I had to stop and rethink the build:



The instructions call for putting a pair of S-hooks on the right fender but according to M&Z they should have a single C-hook on each fender. In my photo, a C-hook is dangling from the front hull tow spot. Fortunately there are two C-hooks in the kit, so I glued one on the right hull. I'll have to figure out how to put some kind of tie-down on it. I wish I had a better picture of what those looked like.

But in figuring this out, looking at the diagrams, I realized the shurzen brackets are shown attached to the fender other some of the other equipment. So I looked at the Dragon instructions and they are ... vague. There are no locating pins or attachment points for them. So I decided to complete the rest of the hull and sort out where to position those brackets once I've dry fit everything else. Then I will complete the fenders.

Amazing results, gentlemen!
And a special tip of the hat for the continuing scratchbuild on your Hetzers interior, William!Very well done!

I've build all external fuel tank supports and their straps and glued them to the hull of my Cold War Bulgarian SU-100.
I also built MiniArts tracks(they were nigntmare to mount-I swore to myself I'll stay away from any clickable track set by any producer).
Detailed the commanders hatch and opened the figure sets.

The SPG commander(MiniArts Soviet Tank Crew 1960-70's) was an easy build- I only needed to swapp an arm and a palm.

But the riding officer was a different story- it took me couple of hours and a combination of parts from MiniArt and ICM(Soviet Staff Officers 1939-1945).

And while there are a lot of gaps to miliput, I'm happy with the realistic poses achieved(those are my first 2 figures since I started modelbuilding).

Some pictures follow:






Take care all!

Excellent work. Your work with copper is fantastic! How did you form the commander's cupola from what looks like white sheet plastic?

Well done.

chuck

Love your metal work, Angel!