Lots of models coming along nicely and bringing a blast of nostalgia. The dogfight double, marketing genius. The Typhoon was the first kit my mum bought me. The Hunter always looked great - brutal, in fact. The Dornier undercarriage is reminding me of those wobbly ones that collapsed sideways when you tried to flip them over. The Defiant, so ridiculously big to just have one propeller. That airliner thing... isn't that the same one you made in the last Airfix campaign? They all look the same to me.
On the armour - the Matilda looks like a really decent kit. The Sherman on the other hand... and to think that Airfix were giving this kit away the other day as a prize in a competition linked to "Fury". Yes, it's not a good way to encourage kids to start making models.
Also blogging this on the "Big A", so lots of detail here
After trying to "just get on with it" I seem to have fallen into that long episode of doing the details that precede putting paint on, and in the terms of this campaign, correcting "egregious errors"...
Over the years half of the jerrycans went missing from the box, leaving four on the sprue. I have the Tamiya set and found that the triple handles fit the noticeably bigger Airfix cans quite well, as do the separate spout / caps,
both an improvement over the incorrect Airfix details (single handle, centred cap). Each was assembled sandwiched with a sheet of plastic shaped slightly smaller than the can to provide the groove around the edge.
Another issue is the block of V section plastic that sits right under the nose and that is so well illustrated on the box art:
It makes it look like a thick piece of armour plate, but in reality, this part under the nose armour (bugpanzer
) was protected from just dust, stones, water etc. by a thin piece of sheet metal riveted or bolted on then curving
under until it meets some kind of plate attached to the underside of the armoured hull just in front of the axle:
(This photo was cropped from the original file
Südfrankreich, Schützenpanzer im Wald , used with following copyright: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-259-1389-16A / Micheljack / CC-BY-SA)
It seems strange that this detail is done in exactly the same way by Tamiya on their "Greif" kit; I hope Gary Boggs won't mind me using his excellent rendition of that kit to illustrate this:
So already having attached that part, I removed it, and the first attempt with a thin sheet of styrene produced an upward curve on either side that didn't look right, plus it was too short:
The difficulty is the curve coming to a bent point where it meets the nose armour plate, while still remaining perfectly square in section when viewed head on. Tried again with thin sheet brass and got something that looked a lot better. The sheet when flat is a rectangle with a shallow chevron cut out.
Interesting to read that one of the main mechanical problems this vehicle suffered from was damage to the front axle due to the centre of gravity being too far forward in relation to the tracks, so too much weight bore down on
the front wheels. Though based on the SdKfz10, for some reason the track run was shorter, with one less road wheel, and then of course the whole vehicle is considerably heavier due to the armour plate. It struck me that
that big lump of metal right under the nose plate, as portrayed in the kit component, would only have made matters even worse...
Next is the quite toy like machine gun shield that has no internal detail and is too thick. Here it is thinned down but with no detail added, then with the start of the detailing:
More details are being added to the inside of the shield, including the bracket that the MG34 handle slots into:
