I made some more progress today and since tomorrow is the AFC and NFC Championship playoff games I'm going to continue working on tracks so figured I should go ahead and post the progress from today and get it out of the way.
Continuing on with the lower hull, I completed Step 3 which is a very simple step as it just adds the lower hatch insert for the radio operator's position to the underside of the glacis plate. While I had the plate loose, I decided to go ahead and address the molded on locator marks that are included there, some of which aren't used at all but the instructions don't indicate that you should remove any. You have to look ahead to Step 21 to see what would be used and what needed to be removed. I don't like leaving locator marks in place so I removed all of them due to their size as a matter of course with a micro chisel and then carefully sanded down the surfaces. The marks on the side of the driver's armored hood were the toughest to remove as they were thick and in a tight space due to the angles of the hood and the weld seams. For those I used the back of a #11 blade to carefully scrape them down and then sanded using an angled cut end of the sanding twig I normally use for tight spaces.
Step 4 preps the fenders by calling for some holes to be opened up on both fenders and the jack block installed on the right fender. I opened the holes with a #68 finger drill but left the block off for now. On the left side the holes don't need to be opened for the mount of the Bosch light as they are already molded open. It was only after I took this pic that I realized I opened up the wrong holes in the left fender...the holes I opened up were for the twin Bosch light seen on the Hornisse but deleted on the Nashorn so I'm going to have to fill those and open up the right holes for the jack block farther back on the fender. Chalk that one up to carelessness on my part and I don't even have the excuse of watching a game on TV to fall back on this time!
Step 5 then attaches the fenders and glacis to the lower hull. I added the glacis first and the fit was mostly ok with just a little bit of putty work required around the triangular corners that are welded to the hull vs. bolted like the rest of the plate. The fenders were next and I used the angled fighting compartment panels C14/C15 to insure I had a good fit and match into their grooves so that when they are installed later on the fenders aren't drooping or causing gaps in that area.
This step also installs the rear hull plate and it had some very deep ejector marks that needed to be filled with putty. These will likely be hidden by the large stowage box that occupies the rear floor area but I didn't want to take any chances so some quick work with Squadron White and the sanding twig fixed it up right. Some additional putty on the exterior joins with the hull sides was also needed in places. The floor was installed and this step also has the infamous M14/M15 inserts that are used to align the lifting eyes properly on the interior sides of the fighting compartment. The instructions now have a blue text that says "for positioning L4 only" and the "do not glue" icon but you don't actually install L4 if following the instruction order until Step 18 so I made a note on the instructions and will do that then instead of now.
Step 6 rounds out the lower hull by adding the tow pintle mount, the exhausts, the rear tow hooks, the crew step, and the spare road wheel mounts as well as other miscellaneous details. I left off the mounts for now and will add them later on but everything else got installed at this step. The top side of the tow pintle mount had large and deep ejector marks that had to be puttied and sanded down before installation. There are some unused mount pins on the hull side that have to be removed on both sides, easily done with the #11 blade, in order for the tow hook and track pin nudge plate to install correctly.
Since there's 2 games tomorrow I should be able to get the tracks together and assembled but I guess that all depends on how good (or not) the games are!