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Michael van Kesteren  I’ll be honest folks. I thought this wasn’t going to happen.. I had a horrible paint-weathering accident and thought it was beyond repair. I will explain all below. But first things first.. Whats in the düse? The box contains the usual get-something-special packaged plastic and die-cast combination that all the 1-48 armour kits are treated to (with the exception of the bren carrier). The box is, however, noticeably taller than the other three 1-48 kit boxes I have, namely the M10, Stug 3 and T34. You can tell by the final comparison with the M10 and Panther next to each other why that is. There are four tan plastic sprues, a bag of screws and polycaps, a length of whay appears to be a nylon chord, The Diecast Hull, the usual excellent instructions and decals for four vehicles. Panzer machen I built this kit alongside the M10. Actually, I built it before the M10. And as they’re of the same lineage a lot I’ve praised about the M10 can be said about the Panther. The kit is one of those kits that just glides together. It really is lovely to build and I’ll happily plant my greedy little mitts on another one. Or even better, a jagdpanther. The fit is excellent, the parts are nicely detailed.. Not much to comment on. It even has closed sponsons! The one thing that annoys me is (actually annoy is a bit too strong here) the grabhandle thing. There’s a separate grabhandle that fits onto the top of the turret above the rear hatch that’s is separate, but all the other handles are molded blobs. I really must get myself a bendicator soon. I’ve found out where they sell brass rod here in South Africa, so there’s really no excuse at all anymore. The other little thing is that nobody seems to know where the tow cables attach to the rear of the vehicle. A quick Google showed me pics of U-shaped brackets protruding out of the rear corners of the engine deck. I made these from bits of a PE fret. Took me 10 seconds. The tracks make up for all the little things that you don’t like. Despite the numerous pinmarks on the inside (What’s that all about? Didn’t see even one on, say, the turret interior or hull interior..), the added droop to them makes them look sooooo gorgeous. There’s something wonderfully aggressive about bare, wide link tracks. That leads me to the build options. As I said, you get four different markings. You can either choose two early or two late models. Each has an option to build with or without the side skirts. I’m not a big fan of the skirts, as they have the tapered-edged-for-thin-look thing going on. Not a bad thing, as they’re perfectly adequate, but I prefer open tracks anyway. I chose the late,skirtless version for a few reasons. First; open tracks, second; crew heater and third; ambush camouflage pattern. The extra part of the crew heater on the rear deck ads a little non symmetry and interest to the rear.    A bridge too Farben I initially tried to paint this using a blue-tack esque masking technique, but found it totally inadequate for the job. I did the red-brown this way, and ended up hand painting the green. By now I have built up a firm hatred against enamels. These were Humbrol and Tamiya enamels, by the way. In future they shall be reserved for detail painting only. Another mishap here happened when I didn’t notice my can of air had fallen over and I suddenly blasted a painted section of the hull with liquid propellant. Poop. A coat of what I figured was a local version of future followed the dot application, then followed again, and again. Needless to say I wasn’t going to use this stuff again. So far it wasn’t going well. Microset and sol were used to get the decals to form over the rear hatch and right hand stowage bin, but for some odd reason the one on the stowage bin decided to silver. Ho-hum. That’ll be muddy, then. Some Humbrol flat coat followed a wash and drybrush with Humbrol enamels (I had to hand the oilpaints back..) and dulled it down nicely. More of that later. I treated the tracks and roadwheels as separate items. Each roadwheel was painted before it went onto the kit. The tracks were painted a red-brown/black mixture. This makes them look heavy when drybrushed and graphited later on. The tracks were left to their own devices until later on in the game. The roadwheels however were glossed, washed and matted. Nice wetter, nein? After I figured I didn’t screw up the M10, I did the paint-chip and scraping. I used a fine brush and painted a slightly more orange red-brown on the vehicle. Otherwise it would disappear against the red-brown camo. Some of these spots were bracketed by a thin application of buff. I used several pastel pencils (brown, green, yellow and white) to create smaller scapes in the paint. Then came the Migs. I did several daft things here. I found out that winter mud should be applied over the winter dust. I also found that the medium I was using lifted the Humbrol matt and frosted several spots badly. At this point I sulked and didn’t touch it for a week, damning it to the experimental box. Thankfully I didn’t in the end. Clever photography fixes a lot. If you look, however, you will see some frosting on the side of the barrel, lower left of the mantlet and top of the extractor fan on the top of the turret. Anyway, back to the weathering. I applied the mud using a mixture of Mig Russian earth, plaster of paris and a health dab of Mig acrylic resin. This dried a nice and dark colour, though I should’ve added some more gloss to it. That would’ve been academic, really, because I stuffed it up (I should rather say ‘happy little accident’, but A: I’m not Bob Ross and B: I now know I could’ve done better. Ho-hum. You learn something new every day, eh?) by then because I applied a considerably lighter Russian earth and Europe dust mixture over all of it. It looks fine, but next time it’ll be different. By the way, first I was using denatured alchol with some water, but later I was usin isopropyl alcohol. I applied that mixture in a heavy-ish wash on the hull and turret sides, roadwheels and tracks. I used a dry mixture on the hull and turret roof, which I then added tonal difference to using a Europe dust and Gulf was sand spot wash on the hull and turret roof which was blended with a quick scrub with a brush (snapping off the MG muzzle, sending it flying..). The tow cables, tools and spare links were treated to various amounts and densities of Mig rust coloured washes. The roadwheels, more specifically the inner set (that run between the track guidehorns) were buffed with Mig gun metal pigment on the rims (which I had first painted black in preperation) where the guidehorns rub against them. A neat little touch, if you ask me, and I’m quite proud of it. The tracks had so far only been washed with the Russian earth-europe dust mix. I first tried to use gun metal pigment, but the application only rubbed paint off of the tracks. I never used to have that problem as a child, but maybe its more due to the fact I brushed layers of millimeters, instead of spraying microns. I decided to instead drybrush with Humbrol 53 gun metal. I’m glad I did, because it lends a lovely heavy steel look to it. Some final touches were made with Mig black smoke. I applied it dry and scrubbed it onto the exhaust and around the turret extractor fan, and used it as a wash to simulate spills and leakages around wheel hubs and fuel filler points.    At the end of the day I’m actually very pleased with the way the Panther turned out. You can build one in a day and they weather up fantastically. I’m most defiantly going to build a few of these guys somewhere along the line, in whichever version I can lay my hands on. The next one will be zimmed, though. You can appreciate by the size of the Panther that the boys in the M10 were pretty brave facing these German behemoths.    copyright©2005 ausfwerks |