World War II Project - Unboxing - Rubicon PzKfw III H/J/L/M/N

 I have been waiting for this kit for a long time. This is the 2nd Edition of Rubicon's PzKfw III kit. I never acquired a copy of their first effort but I did have a copy of their 1st Edition PzKfw IV kit. That particular kit was rather average, the fit of the parts were excellent but some of the details needed to be re-worked. I suspect that the 1st Edition PzKfw III was similar.

This new kit is very versatile, as advertised, you can build the later models of the PzKfw III series, H-N. The early versions are covered in a second kit covering the E-L versions . I'm guessing there is overlap in between the two kits because of vehicle upgrades, field units being upgraded to the next version on the fly (perhaps in the E-L kit you would get armor upgrades consisting of bolted on armor, whereas in the later kit those armor upgrades are built in, guess I'll need to buy as early version box and find out). If you want to build a Panzerbefehlswagen (command) version you no longer need to do conversion work, Rubicon has kindly created a specific kit that will allow you to build one of the E/H/J/L variants (now I need to buy this one since I don't believe there is an L version, it should be E/H/J/K, the E & H have fixed turrets with the big deck mounted aerial frame and the J & K have the star antenna mounted on the back deck, I"ll have to pull out my Panzer Tracts books now).

This kit comes in the big Rubicon box and comes complete with 5 sprues of parts, including two sets of tracks with different versions of the drive wheels and multiple turret and gun mantles to cover the number of guns that were mounted on this chassis. Of course you get all those guns as well from the 5cm KwK 38/L42 to the 7.5cm KwK 39/L60.  The version I'm most interested in is the J, so I may have to buy the early kit to better reflect the Afrika Korps vehicles which would have bolted on armor upgrades as opposed to those for the 6th Panzer Division which would have straight from the factory Js. If you want to see the sprues I would recommend heading over to the Rubicon forum and look up the PzKfw III in the Works in Progress section.

The instruction are pretty standard although the one in this kit is a booklet, 14 pages long, since it has to cover so many variations of the build. I would suggest highlighting the sections that pertain specifically to the version you are going to build so you don't go down the wrong path (which I did with the StuG III kit on several occasions when I was building those). The decals are excellent giving you a lot of variety on potential unit markings including red, white and black turret numbers for the sides and the back of the turret. Since I have two kits I'll try and use as much as I can from a single sheet and save the second sheet for other projects, you can never have enough decals.

I'm definitely looking forward to building this kit, but the line in front of it is long. I have to finish painting the 3 U304 (f) halftracks and 4 StuG IIIs. I have one Jagdpanther that is partially built with 2 more to follow that not to mention 6 PzKfw IVs (3 for Afrika and 3 for Europe). I might go ahead and shift this in front of the PzKfw IVs but no farther up than that.

A few pictures:

Its an intimidating stack of sprues, my bits box will be very full at the end of this build.

The five versions you can build are right on the cover and there is a chart inside as well that covers the years and numbers produced.

It has the 21st Panzer Division markings which makes me happy but the palm trees are in black instead of white which makes me sad.