Continuing on from yesterday's efforts, today was all about the zim! I completed Step 8 which calls for the installation of the angled rear hull extensions as well as the rear hull plate. The rear plate has 10 holes that need to be opened up to allow the installation of the tow pintle and heavy duty rear towing points, easily done with a #68 finger drill. I glued the rear plate to the hull and then added the necessary zim panel from the Atak set using Gator Grip glue and tacking down the edges where needed with CA gel. The Gator Grip glue is an acrylic binder so it provides a good working time to adjust things before it starts to set.
Step 9 deals with the installation of the front hull glacis plate and the tow pintles there as well. The kit plate was replaced in its entirety with the resin part from the Atak set and only minor adjustments were needed on the bottom surface to get it to fit in place. This one has to be glued carefully so I did several test fits before committing to the CA gel. The nose plate also received its zim panel and the hull tow points were also installed.
Step 10 calls for the installation of the superstructure front plate for the driver and hull MG positions. The Atak set offers two options here, one with the extra plate over the MG position and one without, which is a nice touch since it allows some flexibility in terms of modelling #003 earlier or later in its service life. I opted for the extra plate part and drilled out the mount in the ball to take a ModelPoint MG34 tank variant barrel I had as a spare in the AM box. I also skipped ahead a bit to Step 12 and installed the angled plates, parts A14 and A15, since they need to mate up properly with the superstructure plate. Before installing it in place, I used the unused turret zim strips in the Atak set and cut them up to zim the horizontal plate and I will add cutouts later to take the fender support braces once I get to that point in the installation. I haven't decided yet whether to use the kit braces or the Lion Roar and it will make a difference in size.
That set the stage to finally add the side hull zim panels. I removed all of the molded on locator marks that were still present on the sides to avoid interference with the panels laying flat and started at the front. The angled panels were added first followed by the side panels and then the rear panels. The same Gator Grip/CA gel combination was used and there were some gaps that resulted at the panel joins. The gaps were filled with putty and/or small strips of leftover zim from the Atak set as needed to smooth things out. On the superstructure front plate where it joins the angled sides Atak didn't mold zim so this was added using small cut-down strips as well to carry the pattern over to those small sections.
That's as far as I got today and since I will be travelling to Sydney, Australia on business next Saturday, I won't get back to this one for a couple of weeks unfortunately. When I do get back to it the next steps will be add the upper hull plates and start work on the fenders and tools.