Work in progress -- the Tamiya StuG IV is nearly done!
That pesky tread that wouldn't couple turned out to be an easy fix, I shaved off the pins, CA'd the mating surfaces and clamped them, and that was that, no thread needed.
The next save was the bracket that holds the hooks on the forward hull. Besides the arms being too short to seat into the locator holes with the hooks in place, the bracket vanished utterly, one moment in my grasp on the bench, the next it was gone without trace. I shaved down some 1mm square stock, cut three 5mm pieces and built a new bracket:
Here it is part-way along. The stock is still a bit heavy, if I'd had .030" it would have been better. I painted the uprights, then glued the crosspiece on and painted it, then washed the lot with diluted burnt umber.
The spare wheels are washed, drybrushed and mounted along with the retaining bar:
The gunner's hatch is now open and the MG shield and gun are fitted. I took this opportunity to break out the Mig pigments and go over a few areas with Europe Dust (dulling the decals, for instance), and to do the exhaust stain with Black Smoke. Two views of the beast as she stands tonight:
All the final tools are on. I didn't fit the tow cable on the rear end as it wasn't fitted in the 1991 article I'm following. Neither was a radio antenna, and I need to make a choice about that. Oh, thanks for the info that this unit is the Panzerlehr -- the kit plans are in Japanese so there's no way to glean that sort of info. If it was a training vehicle radio gear and other bits and pieces might have been left off at times, depending on the duties of the moment, so perhaps the original article was based on photographs in which the vehicle was in this particular configuration.
Still, it's not a slavish following of the original, there's artistic variation and a few details are different, so I could mount an antenna on the assumption that training would follow the same protocols as the battlefield and radio communications were one of the key factors in modern armoured warfare laid down by ... Von Manstein, was it? ... in the development phase of the Panzercorps, so it makes sense it would be there.
There are a few small jobs to go, such as creating lenses for the sighting systems from clear cement, painting the periscopes (a job I hate and may delay until I can use painted decal pieces instead), and of course there's the fgure. I'm ambivalent about that, I've never done a figure successfully before and this may be the wrong time to try -- we'll see. Otherwise, she's about done right now.
I'll get the proper gallery shots when the last jobs are out of the way, but I can say right now that I'm pleased with this old kit, and with the Cavalier zimmerit, and would do another in a heartbeat.
Cheers, Mike/TB379
PS: Wouldn't you know it, my Dragon Kugelblitz was in today's post... Oh, for another month! 