Moving on to the upper hull and superstructure, the first thing to do, since I wanted to do a two-tone camouflage was remove remove the tropen aspects of the kit. The order to paint German armor all grey didn’t go out until June 1940, after the fall of France, and since the kit is an up-armored version, it’s post Poland.
This means filling in the holes in the aft port. I decided to use a technique I just read about in Fine Scale Modeler. I put tape over the holes and spread Tamiya grey putty underneath.
fig. 3-1
fig. 3-2
fig. 3-3
Unfortunately, my putty was quite old by this point, and very gummy. It never dried out, and remained gummy no matter how long I waited. Threw it out (along with my ancient Milliput).
fig. 3-4
Eventually I scraped as much from the top as I could and added new Tamiya white putty over it. Worked like a charm.
The commander’s cupola was not well designed. After attaching the lower half, there were nasty gaps between the cupola and the raised areas you can see in one of the images above. Since I didn’t have decent putty yet, and because of one of the images I’d seen on the web (which had an obvious metal strip added), I decided to add a 0.3mm x 1mm strip around the edge (I later removed it and put a 0.3 x 0.8mm strip to allow better visibility into the cupola).
fig. 3-5
fig. 3-6
Because of that obvious vent behind the superstructure, I added a piece of styrene for a firewall.
fig. 3-7
fig. 3-8
And that’s enough for today.
Part 1, review
Part 2, road wheels
Part 3, superstructure
Part 4, hull
Part 5, finishing up
armor fiend 