Italeri Stug III G - Part III

Yeah... nothing says Christmas like doing some work on a Nazi armored vehicle! Alright, most of work has actually been done over last couple of days, today I just applied finishing touches to the paint job.

As you can see from images below, the Stug is now completely assembled, painted and awaiting first coat of blank varnish. Reaching this stage turned out to be something of an adventure, filled with problems and mishaps.

As previously mentioned, the model itself is extremely simple to assemble. With the exception of tracks, I could glue together all parts before spraying the base coat. Then came first (and perhaps only) important decision during assembly step - would I work with chassis and superstructure separately or should I put them together and hope I could put tracks in place once I was done with the paint job. I decided for the second alternative - naaaag, wrong choice... but more on that later on.

Once the model was in one piece, it was time to take out the airbrush. Overall coat of sand yellow was followed by standard German disruptive pattern consisting of olive green and dark brown blotches. I tried to apply the pattern used according to Italeri in Normandy 1944, but the end result should be regarded as "free interpretation" rather than meticulous reproduction of cammo scheme shown in instruction manual. The simple truth is that I still have a lot to learn about airbrushing.

Once the cammo was applied, it was time to put the tracks in place. That's when the nightmare in this project began. First of all, as turned out, there wasn't enough room to squeeze the track links between the front sprockets and mud guards of superstructure. After brief and futile attempt to push track links into place (net result of that effort was a broken sprocket wheel ) I realized that I had to partially break up the model to even have a chance to get those tracks in place.

Misery likes however company and this case it was no different. There is no other way to say it - Italeri seriously dropped the boll with track assembly for this model. As can be seen in pictures I posted previously,  track assembly consists of a couple of solid sections and a number of individual links that are supposed to be  wrapped around the wheels. The thing is though that the sprue itself seems to be reused from another kit and needs to be cut to size before it is put together. The simple fact is that no matter how much you'll try, you will not be able to complete the assembly if you follow instructions provided by Italeri. Luckily there is a surplus of separate links, which can be used to cobble together passable tracks. But the assembly process which should be pretty straightforward is a real pain in the neck and in my case at least, the final result looks rather shoddy. Luckily, I build 1/72 AFV:s for my wargaming, where 1 meter rule applies - if it looks good from a distance of one meter, then it will do.