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Tamiya Sd.Kfz.171 Panther Ausf. A


earlymb
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First let me state that I'm a beginning modeller, so don't expect absolute perfection 😁

 

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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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zLznAw1BA&t=3250s

 

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.

 

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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'.

 

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And the current state of the Panther, in grey primer awaiting its final paintjob:

 

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The kit comes with 2 figures, a driver and a commander. Both are very basic, roughly cast and lack any detail so I probably won't use them. They are however perfect to practice figure painting so I decided to attempt to give the commander an Erbsentarn uniform, using the colours I have and this tutorial as a guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wSmpAvzG1w

 

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Step 1. After priming I applied the base colour of Dunkelgelb. For shades (like in creases) I used DG with a drop of black, for highlights I used DG with some Elfenbein. This doesn't have to be too exact.

 

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Step 2. I applied patches of dark green (Dunkelgrün) and a lighter colour made from Dunkelgelb, Elfenbein and a touch of Flesh.

 

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Step 3. Dot the whole uniform with the Dunkelgelb/Elfenbein/Flesh mix, avoiding the green patches.

 

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Step 5. Dot the lighter patches with Dunkelgrün.

 

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Step 6. Dot the green patches with the Dunkelgelb base colour.

 

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Step 7. Apply dots of light green over the whole uniform. The camouflage is now finished.

 

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After painting the details and applying a matt varnish coat and a wash. Belt, holster, boots and headphones are black; side cap and shoulderboards (I made this fellow an Oberscharführer) are black-grey. The collar of the shirt is still in primer as I actually like this shade of light grey and the skin is a mix of light skintone with some heavy skintone. Not bad for a first try but I think I can improve by using a slightly darker base colour, and applying fewer but bigger patches of green and the lighter colour.

 

Colours used:

Vallejo Model Air 71.025 Dark Yellow / Dunkelgelb

Vallejo Model Air 71.041Armour Brown / Rotbraun

Vallejo Model Air 71.011Dark Green / Dunkelgrün

Vallejo Model Air 71.075 Ivory / Elfenbein

Vallejo Model Air 71.062 Aluminium

Vallejo Model Air 71.055 Black-Grey

Vallejo Model 70.950 Black

Vallejo Game 72.140 Heavy Skintone

Acrylic lighter skintone

Acrylic light green

 

To be continued when the airbrush arrives...

 

 

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Proud Kraut

Clean and proper build of the Panther, excellent! The Erbsentarn camo of the tanker looks great as well. You got the maximum out of this old figure. Can´t wait to see your new airbrush gun in action.

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I made this tank, since I always liked the ausf. A best. I added AM zimmerit but I screwed up with the AM tracks and had to use the vinyl ones that came with it. Not my best work, but I will try again in the near future. Good luck with your build.

 

Semper Fi.

 

Manny

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Good luck with that NEO airbrush from Iwata. I bought one at HobbyLobby and it only lasted for 2 weeks. Something is blocking the paint flow. I checked the tip, the washers, but all it does now is bubble up in the cup. It's a shame because Iwata airbrushes are supposed to be 'top of the line' but this model hasn't gotten good reviews and I can attest to that. I recently got another trusty Badger 300 airbrush. I hope you have a good one.

 

Semper Fi.

 

Manny

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Well, we'll see what will happen. I've heard some bad stories about Badger too but it seems to work fine for most people, so let's hope it will be the same with the Neo. Why didn't you return it for repair, as it comes with a 5-year warranty?

 

I had ordered a small compressor with tank from AliExpress but when it still didn't show up when the buyer protection was about to expire I filed a dispute and was refunded without any trouble. I have no idea if it was ever shipped in the first place, returned to sender or might suddenly show up but I'm not going to order another one for now. Instead I ordered a pressure regulator with valve and watertrap to put on my current Sparmax compressor, which is working fine but doesn't have a tank.

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Thanks!

 

And I used it today for the first time. The base coat is Vallejo Model Air 71.025 Dark Yellow / Dunkelgelb. I sprayed the wheels individually and then painted the rubber by hand with Vallejo Model Air 71.055 Black-Grey, after which I put them on the model.

 

I then applied the camouflage, starting with Vallejo Model Air 71.041Armour Brown / Rotbraun, followed by Vallejo Model Air 71.011Dark Green / Dunkelgrün. It looks adequate although I'm hindered a bit that my compressor doesn't have an pressure gauge and I need to do it by guess. Maybe I'll enlarge a few of the brown patches slightly. The next step will be applying decals, sealing everything with a varnish and then I can think about weathering.

 

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Proud Kraut

Hard to believe that this is your first modeling project 😉 I think you did a very good job. The dark yellow base paint looks excellent and your camo stripes turned out well. In some areas I would remove the paint spots but that´s no big thing. I can recommend masking tape to avoid these. I would leave the brown stripes as they are. In the field they used the colors that were available. Looking forward to decals filters, washing, details....Very well done!

 

Lars

 

P.S.: Now you are happy with your new gun, aren´t you?

 

 

 

Panther.jpg

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Thank you, yes I noticed the splattering too. It's only on a few spots but I will try to remove it; I like the feathered edge but this is out of scale.

 

I gave the Rotbraun a second coat and now it pops a bit more next to the green.

 

I'm currently trying to find some information about the decals, as the instructions give absolutely no info about the given unit-options and what combinations are correct.  Thus far I only applied 2 Balkenkreuzen to the sides, in front of the tools.

 

And yes, up till ow the Neo is very nice. My old Chinese one is permanently out of action so I'll get a new cheap one for the rough work as it wasn't that bad actually.

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Yesterday I applied the decals and fixed them with Vallejo Decal Fix and Softener on areas I first varnished with satin varnish. As I want a Normandy setting I opted for the 2nd Panzer Division; a decal for this unit was provided but I modified another decal and used that instead; everyone else seems to use the LSSAH option anyway.

After the decals had dried I varnished the whole model and applied some Vallejo 71.075 Elfenbein (Ivory) from about 30 cm away to give a dusty effect. After that had dried the actual weathering began by brushing a coat of heavily thinned (90%) Vallejo Smoke 70.939. This gives the model a very slightly darker, dirty look. I then applied a pinwash with a home-made mix of heavily thinned brown and black oilpaints, as my local modelshop was out of of the Tamiya panel line accent products. I have never used them but the results in various youtube vids seem spectacular. I am relatively satisfied with the results of my homebrew mix though.

 

Next comes chipping, weathering of the exhaust and playing with the tracks.

 

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And forward we go!

 

The kit comes with 2 molded towing cables that, according to the instructions, can be heated so you can bend them in the desired shape. Good idea, doesn't work and it snapped like a twig. So I took 3 lenghts of thin metal florist's wire of roughly the same lenght, twisted these together on one end and put it in a cordless drill, while keeping the other ends in a pair of pliers and just let the drill twist the wire for a few seconds. The result can be seen here:

 

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You do need to take care the pieces of wire between the drill and pliers are of the same lenght, or you'll get kinks. I then cut off the eyelets of the plastic cables, drilled a 1mm hole and glued the metal wire in:

 

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And the result:

 

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It's easy to bend them, but it takes some time, trial & error to get them on the model in a natural looking way. The good thing is you can just keep shaping them as long as you want. After I was happy with them I gave them a wash with black grey to darken them a bit, and with the metal shining clearly through I think it gives a natural finish:

 

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Another job done is weathering the exhausts. i painted them a mid-gray colour and then used a torn piece of sponge to dapple on some white to imitate the look of metal that becomes hot regularly. I then used the same technique to dapple on some dark- and light browns, to simulate rust:

 

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I finished them by adding some light soot to the end of the stacks. Not too much as the Panther had a gasoline Maybach V12 engine and not a diesel. I made the soot by scraping some powder of a piece of black chalk pastel with a scalpel, wetted the area I wanted the soot to go with some water and rubbing he powder on with a finger. You can use a small brush or q-tip to reach the areas where you can't reach with a finger.

 

I used the same technique to add some soot to the muzzle due to muzzle flash:

 

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Which also made me realize I didn't add any 'kill rings' to the barrel... maybe I'll add some later. Last for now are the tracks. All I did for now was spraying them dull black, and getting them on the kit was a bit fiddely The joint between the edges is ugly but that can't be helped, and I hope to be able to hide it with dirt later on. The tracks are quite tight and as such are pulling the drive sprockets out of alignment, so after they went on (which is easier to do if the sprockets can rotate) I glued them to the hull. I then carefully sanded some paint of the top of some wheels, added superglue and used some AAA batteries to push the tracks down onto the roadwheels to give the correct sagging:

 

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Original pictures show that the track doesn't touch the roadwheels till the third wheel from the sprocket, so that's the first one I glued and I quite like the effect.e0d5eaf27d99c219a61073f275221c3c.jpg.d50db78fdc82064f25e56cea79642bf4.jpg

 

Still to do: chipping the hull and turret, and weathering the running gear.

 

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Proud Kraut

Well, you really did your homework! Your paintwork on the muzzle break and the exhausts looks super realistic. The tracks look great as well so far. And you really took care of solving the well known plastic cable problem.

 

Two additional remarks. I started with metal cables as well but then found some similar thrilled thread online. It´s much more easy to handle than the stiff metal cable.

One more point. Panzer crews often connect (term?) their towing cables with the shackles to save time when in need. So I would fix one end of the cable with the front or rear shackles of the tank. Here´s a pictue of the thread I mentioned.

 

 

 

Kabel.jpg

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Proud Kraut

I see, I thought these were with the kit. "ABER" offers them separately in 1/35. The cable I´m using is 0,8 mm or 1 mm twisted beads cord (Perlenschnur). Something like this (picture from ebay):

 

 

 

 

Seidenkordel.jpg

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I don't have any pigments, so I experimented a bit. After spraying the tracks flat black I first tried a wash with acrylic burnt sienna, but that wasn't a success. After that I made a paste of ground brown and grey-brown chalk pastels with water, and applied those and that actually turned out pretty good:

 

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I then made some mud effects. I don't have any special product for this so I used regular soil from the garden. I mixed PVA glue, some brown oilpaint and some dirt together to a paste and smeared that behind and above the tracks and on the wheels. It dries solid and I think it looks pretty good. Since the colour can be varied with the paint you add to the mix you can use this recipe for a lot of different muds, and it's basically free. I will use this more often. I did learn that it's better to apply the mud before you put on  the tracks but since I went for a light effect (the setting is Normandy, not Russia in Spring) I think it turned out rather well.

 

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I did the chipping by applying small ones in a slightly lighter shade then the base colour; I used Elfenbein. Some of the bigger chips were partially filled in with some dark reddish brown, to simulate primer showing through. Some look pretty good, others a bit less but it's all part of the learning curve.

 

Last job done was making and antenna of stretched sprue, another first for me. I painted it Feldgrau and the lenght is just a guess.

 

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I think that about concludes this build. Maybe I'll make a diorama for it later, if so I'll make a separate topic for that.

 

Thanks for watching!

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Proud Kraut

Congratulations for finishing you first modelling tank project! You did an excellent job and got the most out of this Tamiya kit. I really enjoyed following your work!  If this was your first tank kit I can only imagine what you will be able to do in the future. Now please let us know: what´s the next kit in the pipeline?

 

P.S.: IMHO this Panther really deserves his own dio.

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Thanks!

A Tamiya Horch 1a S.GL. Einheits Personenkraftwagen set in Russia, winter 1942-'43 that I already started on 🤣

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