This weekend's efforts were very productive and a lot of progress made. First up was to continue from last time and complete Step 3. This step calls for all the road wheels to be installed and this was skipped until after painting but I did go ahead and assemble and install the radiator and fans for the interior. The instructions have a small pitfall here if you're not careful, you have to make sure the end with the slots is at the back on both sides otherwise when it comes time to fit the upper hull with the grills, things won't fit properly.
Steps 4 and 5 deal with the rear hull plate and its installation into the lower hull and I reversed the order of the steps. The instructions would have you add all the detail to the plate first, then install it, and that of course makes things harder in terms of getting everything to fit properly and line up as it should. So I installed the plate to the lower hull first and did a test fit with the upper hull to make sure the alignment was correct. For the hull details, I added everything except the clear part for the rear Notek light and also assembled the jack but left it separate for now to make it easier to paint that area before it is installed. I also used a drill bit and pin vise to deepen the look of the air cooling pipes since the parts were molded hollow but not deep enough for my tastes.
I also added the tow shackles from Step 2 but didn't glue them down so that they remain free-swinging.
Step 6 is a simple step, it adds the cast collar for the gun mount along with the hull MG mount and the periscope for the driver. Step 7 assembles the hull MG and installs it into the ball mount so I combined the two as a single effort. You can assemble the multi-part MG which is highly detailed if you want but none of it will be seen...so I took a shortcut and only used the barrel portion, J28, and glued that into position in the mount. The fit of the cast collar doesn't exactly correspond to the shape of the cut-out in the hull, so I needed to use small amounts of Squadron White putty around the edges to fill the slight gaps that were present. I used a small amount of poster blue tack putty to mask the clear portion of the periscope that would be visible after painting and painted a small amount of MM non-buffing Metalizer Steel on the back side to create a slightly reflective surface that will still show through once the rest of the periscope is painted.
Step 8 deals with the construction of the main engine compartment access hatch and also adds quite a bit of detail on the rear engine deck with the various fuel port covers, lifting eyes, etc. I did need a small amount of putty around the catch for the crew compartment rear hatch as the opening provided was larger than the small tab on its base.
Step 9 deals with the assembly of the gun cleaning rod tube and I skipped that for now and will come back to it after the upper and lower hulls are joined. Step 10 adds the large grates for the engine deck along with their PE mesh grills but I only added the grates for now to help stiffen the rear deck a bit and avoid potentially damaging the grills when the upper and lower hulls are joined. Test fits had shown that that was going to require some major help and I didn't want them to get damaged in the process.
Before the upper and lower hulls could be joined, the main gun had to be assembled and prepped for installation into the upper hull. The assembly takes place in Step 15 so skipping ahead to that step showed that the breech and external portions of the gun needed to be assembled separately. The breech is relatively straight forward, just the two halves of the breech plus the recoil housing on top. This joins to a trunnion mount that then is trapped against the collar from the inside using the large square/rectangular piece T21. If you don't glue the pins on the trunnions mount into T21, the gun will remain free to elevate but the weight of the barrel portion is too much and the gun will droop as a result. In order to get the right elevation pose, I avoided gluing the trunnion mount just yet.
The gun barrel assembly is a multi-part process and the instructions contain an error in directing you to use TF3 as the base of the muzzle brake. The d-shaped opening on that brake is not aligned properly and instead you need to use part Q2 to get the right arrangement. The barrel is molded as one piece and only slight sanding was needed to remove the barely visible mold seam top and bottom. Once the muzzle brake had set up, I used a sanding twig to carefully remove the join seam on it and then glued it into position before installing the barrel into the mantlet.
After everything had set up properly, I installed the breech first into the upper hull using regular glue to insure a solid bond. The external barrel and mantlet were then glued in place and I applied regular glue to the trunnion pins on the mount, holding the barrel in place to keep my desired pose elevation for a few minutes until the glue caught. I set the upper hull upright off to the side and let gravity do the rest of the work until the glue had fully set up.
Now came the tough part, joining the upper and lower hulls together. The instructions save this to the very next to the last step in the assembly order and that's a recipe for disaster in my opinion. There's an incredible amount of tension at the front hull due to the angled surface of the glacis and the way it joins together with the lower hull and the only way to get a solid join was to approach this in multiple phases. The first phase was to use multiple rubber bands and regular glue to insure the sides mated up properly with the hull sponsons added back in Step 2. At the same time, finger pressure, regular glue, and spot applications of liquid glue were needed at the hull front so there's no way to clamp or use rubber bands easily at that area. I held it with my fingers for a good 10-15 minutes until the glue had caught sufficiently to hold it on its own.
Once the sides had set up thoroughly, additional rubber bands were needed to bring the rear plate and deck into proper alignment.
Once the patient was removed from the traction, I returned to Step 10 and added the PE grills. These fit fairly snugly into their respective positions so only liquid glue was needed to get them to stay in place. This had the added advantage of not running the risk of CA clogging the grills and showing up later when painted.
I also added all of the rear superstructure details from Step 13 and opted to add the rear hull storage box since the vehicle I want to portray, #323 with the sHPzAbt 654 with the striped camo pattern, shows this box installed. I removed the stub antenna post from the antenna mount part M3 and drilled out the rubber base portion with a #72 finger drill so I can mount a brass 2m antenna later on. I also added the two cable clamp bases called for in Step 17 although the cables themselves won't get installed until after the hull is painted.
Rounding out the day's activity, I completed the assembly of the roof plate as directed in Step 14, opting to have all the hatches in the closed position. The instructions contain a small error in this step in that the armored periscope cover on the rotating mount for the rabbit ears scope is incorrectly identified as N9 when it should be N10 since N9 is too small and is already used elsewhere on the roof plate. All of the clear periscopes received the same MM metalizer treatment and were masked with blue tack before their installation.
The fit of the roof plate into the superstructure is a tight one and I used regular glue around the inside of the base combined with liquid glue around the outer edges where the molded on weld seam detail was present to get a good consistent join all around.
Next up will be the addition of the remaining hull exterior details that were skipped before it will be time to start the exterior paint work.