First let me state that I'm a beginning modeller, so don't expect absolute perfection
The subject of this post will be Tamiya's Panther Ausf. A. This is my first tank, my first German vehicle even and I selected this kit for a few reasons. First of all, it's pretty cheap and it is for a reason. It has been on the market since 1969 and is still in production today, virtually unchanged its release. That means details are pretty basic and to upgrade it to the level of more recently released kit you will need to spend a fortune on aftermarket sets, something I'm not going to do. Another reason is that I want to practice a bit with the German camouflage pattern in use since late 1943; a Dunkelgelb basecolour with green and red/brown stripes and this is the perfect victim.
A nice video of the full history of this kit, with the length of an average movie: YouTube
While I started to build this kit there is only so much I can do at this moment, as my old cheap Chinese airbrush (which wasn't that bad actually) has developed some problems and my new Iwata Neo airbrush is still underway, almost 2 months after ordering it. So basically I build the kit as far as I can till I reached the painting stage. I use an acrylic primer in a spraycan so that's how far I got at this moment.
Even though I'm building this model straight out of the box I did make a few modifications. For some reason Tamiya left the sides of the hull above the tracks wide open and even though you won't be able to see it from the sides it just annoyed me, so I got some 0.75mm thick plastic sheet from the modelling shop and closed these areas. I didn't bother with filler, when the paint and weathering is on you won't be able to see it anymore anyway. It just annoyed me. This model was originally intended to be motorized and the bottom and side of the hull have a number of slots in them, which Tamiya never bothered to close. The ones on the bottom I'll leave, but I did close 2 slots above the idler wheels with the same plastic strip. The only other modification I did was to change some of the handles and hand-holds to ones I made from soldering wire.
A nice touch that actually is present on the model is the casting of the rough sides of the armour plates used in the jig-saw type of construction used of the real thing. They were missing on the lower front plate though so I made them with a small grinder bit on a Dremel-type tool, and used the same to make the casted rough areas that were present a bit rougher. The photo's below also clearly show the surface of the plastic is a bit 'pebbly'.
And the current state of the Panther, in grey primer awaiting its final paintjob:
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