Continuing on from yesterday, Step 4 deals with the assembly of the rear hull plate and the exhaust/intake arrangement. This step is a very busy one with lots of arrows and parts all going on to the rear plate, so you have to pay close attention to what goes where and when. There’s a sub-assembly step that directs you to install the towing pintle pins, B39, into the halves of the pintles first before installation but this is just asking for trouble, so I installed them into their respective slots on either side and then inserted B39 with just a touch of liquid glue to hold it in place. The twin exhausts were installed next. The rounded armored access cover on the lower hull has a little call-out box that presents the option of including a small towing pintle for it, however the pintle part is incorrectly labelled as G12 when it’s actually C18 and to use C18 you will have to perform some surgery on the cover B29 since it’s molded solid and doesn’t have the required D-shape hole to take it. To add to the mystery a bit more, C18 is marked as “not for use” on the sprue directory page…so I just left it off and installed it as is.
The last parts to be installed in this step are the most critical in terms of placement and alignment. These are the fins, parts A5/A6, that attach above the exhausts and will also install into slots in the hull tub. The attachment points for these parts are very small and don’t sit flush but rather have a slight curve to them, making it easy for them to slip out of alignment. To get around this, I installed them one at a time and then inserted the plate into its installation area and adjusted the fin to match to its corresponding slot and then let it sit there until the glue held, then slid the plate out and installed the next fin, repeating the process until all 4 were installed.
Step 5 calls for the installation of all the road wheels, sprockets, etc. and so was largely skipped with the exception of the installation of the final drive housings for the sprockets and the idler mounts since they will play a role in Step 6 with the installation of the rear hull plate.
Step 6 is a multi-step process, the first of which calls for the installation of the rear plate along with the mesh screens and smoke grenade racks. To accomplish this, the rear plate has to go in first and this is a tight fit as it also has to fit over the posts on the idler mounts and the fins have to go into their tabs, all at the same time, so some very slow and careful maneuvering is necessary to get it all into place. Once that was done, the smoke grenade rack was installed followed by the PE mesh screens. The mesh screens actually rest on a series of small tabs instead of flush to the hull and it’s important that the screens not overhang at all at any of the edges to avoid problems when fitting the angled rear plate. The screens had to be coaxed gently into position due to the tight spaces but once in place were glued down with some liquid glue to the tabs since additional parts were going to be installed in just a bit to further trap and hold the screens in place.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the rear plate and the housings on the idler mounts to meet…and I believe it’s because instead of installing them flush as I did in Step 1, they probably should have had a slight overhang. The gap that results isn’t large and was solved with some putty, but perhaps waiting to install them until this Step would’ve eliminated the problem altogether. There’s no real reason to do the assembly in Step 1 vs. Step 5/6 other than the instructions follow the theory that the mounts should be constructed at the same time as the wheels themselves I guess.
With the rear plate installed, the angled lower hull plate B15 was also installed. This has some nice weld seam detail provided but the overhanging weld bead isn’t quite thick enough in some places and little holes/gaps were present even with the judicious use of liquid glue and finger pressure. Those would be filled in with putty afterwards without any real issue. The upper rear plate was also installed along with the crank starter port and the deflector screens also installed to finish off this step. The edges of these parts are bevelled to make them appear more to scale in terms of thickness but the side parts still appear thicker than they should IMHO and could benefit from PE replacements.
Moving on to Step 7, the left side fender was assembled with all of its various components. The tools will be detailed and installed later as will the spare wheels, but all the fender braces and various other items were installed as directed. One of the neat options presented here, although I didn’t use it, is the choice on the rear mudflaps to go with either the one-piece with the triangular underside mini-flap molded together or have the triangular flap separate as either a styrene or PE piece with an independent flap with the hole cutout present. This option would conceivably allow you to pose the mud-flap in the raised position over the Notek light if desired. The trickiest part of assembling this fender has to be the jack and its mounts. The jack is a multi-part assembly and you have to be sure to have the foot extended slightly to allow for the mounting bracket to fit…something the instructions don’t clearly indicate but becomes readily apparent when you try to fit the bracket if you’ve installed it flush. There’s also an error in the instructions, part G48 is actually part G54 as the base portion of the mount.
Step 8 is a simpler step even though it deals with the right side fender, there’s a lot less that installs on that side and so goes quicker. The fender support braces are installed along with a small stowage box at the front and the antenna tray. The other pioneer tools and gun cleaning rods were left off until later, same as with the left side. The antenna tray presents two options in terms of how the support feet are arranged, you can choose to have the leading foot pointing either outward or inward…I chose the inward as a coin-toss choice more than anything else. The tray has molded in wood-grain that’s very nice as a detail.
That ended the day’s efforts, next up will be the rear engine deck.
the stug parts fit the pzIII perfectly