World War II Project - Return to Normandy - P107/U304(f) Halftrack

The UNIC P107, U304(f) in German nomenclature, is another one of the vehicles needed for the Kampfgruppe Von Luck Pint Sized Campaign from Two Fat Lardies. Warlord Games is the only manufacturer of the regular P107, they also have a command version. There is also a command version available from Mad Bob Miniatures and I really wish he had the standard version. I have been putting off assembling these for a long time at this point. There are a couple of major things wrong with the resin and metal castings that I just haven't had the patience to sit down and figure out how to fix it without making it in to a long term project.

Here are the issues with this kit:

1) The resin body definitely didn't come out of the mold cleanly and there is a lot of filing required between the upper and lower body panels on the passenger compartment. I have two different castings; one in light grey resin which really wasn't to bad and two in a lighter almost yellow grey resin which required a lot of knife and file work to make it look vaguely acceptable. Fortunately these will be tabletop miniatures so its unlikely that anyone will be talking a close look.

2) The metal windshield isn't quite big enough to fit into the opening in the body. I have contemplated rebuilding it out of sheet styrene but I'm not sure I want to go to that much work. I'm thinking of maybe adding a styrene plastic edge to it and then cutting and filing to fit. Still brooding on this one.

3) Axles; there are two long and two short axles all cast in pewter. Just trying to test fit them was a chore and the possibility of damage during a game is pretty good. I'm going to replace these with brass rod to give it some extra strength.

Once those issues are dealt with I think I can make them look pretty good on the table. I apparently need to replace all my super glue at this point, its not working on pewter to plastic or pewter to pewter. I need to see if I have some epoxy hiding someplace.

I only cut out one set of axles so I can figure out what sized brass rod I need to replace them with. At this point I also left all the MGs on the sprues to deal with later. Technically you can mount 3 MGs on the body but that looks really crowded. I think there are 5 MGs provided for each of the three models so I'm going to have some spares.