I took the plunge last night, seems like I'm at a short impasse with my Merkava, so out came the Super Pershing. I spent some time looking at pics I ahve and then looking at what HobbyBoss puts in the box, just to see what's what. I pretty quickly decided HB's road wheels were not as good as Tamiya's, so out came a spare Tamiya Pershing. Also determined the the actual Super had a drive sprocket that is not what either HB or MrT supply, but the Tamiya part is closer. I may noodle on this further, not sure. The HB sprocket is nice, but the fit is problematic, and it's a touch too wide to comfortably fit the Friuls.
So off to the races. HB gives you an engine compartment, with engine, but I really don't want to go there, so I only installed the minimum interior parts necessary to allow fitting the working torsion bars. Good thing too, since the interior bulkheads and engine compartment floor are covered with ejection pin marks, something else I've had enough of for a while. I now have the swing arms and bump stops in, road wheels and sprockets together and took a peek at the working(!) shocks. My plan (I say that in all seriousness now) is to get the rest of the suspension built, assemble and mount the Friuls, and then set the nose-down ride height by gluing the semi-fragile swing arms in place. This all needs to be done before I mate the upper and lower hulls. I also started the final drives by whacking off the reinforcements only seen on later build Pershings. This is something necessary on HB and Tamiya M26 kits if you're building an earlier model, as the ribs were added to the back-side of the final drive housings after quite a few had been built. The resulting holes are filled with Aves 2 part putty, and will be cleaned up and detailed later.
So, da pics:
First, my start pic, then the lower hull, which kind of looks like a caterpillar now.
BTW, I started a new p-bucket account for this build, and it's wonky. Awesome.