World War II Project, STuG Project - Two down, two to go

I'm calling these finished and I'm taking them to Reaper Con just to get some feedback on them. I'm pretty happy with them but I see some flaws too. I also wanted to get them looked at before I start throwing stowage on them.

I picked a specific unit for my Stugs; Sturmgeschutz-Brigade 341. Ut had a couple of unusual characteristics that I wanted to try and model and it would make them stand out on the game table from all the other Stugs out there.

First the maintenance crews modified the front skirt to make maintenance a little easier on the front drive sprocket. Second they welded plate over the gun mount to help keep debris from falling in and possibly fowling the movement of the gun. The third, which doesn't make much sense, is they bent the top of the skirts over towards the upper hull. Not sure what they were attempting to accomplish but its clearly visible in the pictures. My main reference for this was "STUG III & IV, German Army, Waffen-SS and Luftwaffe, Western Front, 1944-45" by Dennis Oliver and published by Tank Craft. The Tank Craft books are excellent. I found a number of other photos of Stugs from this unit which provided some other angles, most from "Sturmgeschutz on the Battlefield" I just don't remember which volume those picture were in.

Sturmgeschutz III ausf G, 2 battery, Sturmgeschutz-Brigade 341, France, summer 1944. 
Rats, I just noticed that I swapped the two interior skirts. I'll have to see if I can fix that.

Sturmgeschutz III ausf G, 3 battery, Sturmgeschutz-Brigade 341

World War II Project - STuG III Decals

Found a little time to get the decals on the STuGs and the STuH. I used the decals from the Rubicon Jagdpanther kit as those seemed to be a better match for the unit STuG battalion I'm modeling. I ended up having to splice some of the numbers together but I think they came out okay.

I did prep by applying a satin finish to the full body of the STuGs and the skirts. After I had the decals on I hit them up with another layer of the satin finish to seal the decals. I can finally move on to the fun part!

World War II Project - StuG III Skirt Modifications II - Rubicon

Moving forward on the STuG III skirts. The original vision for the skirts was to get that loose, out of alignment look. Easy to achieve with Rubicon kit just cut the panels apart and you are good to go. This creates a couple of issues:

1) Painting, I discovered this during the priming stage and then got stubborn about it. If you cut them apart before you paint them then you need to tape them down to something or they will blow all over the place if you are using and airbrush or rattle can.

2) Once you cut them apart it basically becomes impossible to figure out which ones were part of the same skirt. Why is this an issue? Its an issue because unless you can match up the pieces you cut apart they don't fit together as well and you will need to do some filing to get nice fits, even if the plan is for the loose look.

All of that is easily solved, just need some double sided tape and popsicle sticks. Painting the back will be a paint but that to can be overcome, especially since the back side will only be painted in the base dunkelgelb color. On the positive side of cutting the panels up first, it was much easier to bend the tops of the first three panels than if it had been one solid piece.

The skirts are just about ready to get back into the spray booth.

Panels bent, the second set went much faster.

Squadron Green to fill the joint. I split a couple almost all the way through so some Squadron Green was needed on the front in a couple of places.

Filing and cleaning up the obnoxious Squadron Green putty.

I had already mounted the first set on popsicle sticks, there is that hindsight issue again. You can see that I did manage to completely snap off the top of one panel. I'll still paint that one as a single unit and I just won't mount that panel.

Filing and cleaning... again would have been easier to do before I taped them down. I didn't pull them up since I would have needed to put new tape down and two-sided tape is kind of expensive.

Panels ready for painting. They will be much easier to paint mounted to the popsicle sticks.

World War II Project - StuG III Skirt Modifications - Rubicon

Rubicon Models STuG III ready for paint

I started the STuG III project much earlier in the year and they have been languishing on the back of the workbench for some time now. As the U304 (f)s near completion I have pulled these out to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with them. Work has been held up for a couple of different reasons, I wanted to practice the weathering techniques that I have been using on the 21st Panzer Division vehicles and I wasn't quite sure which unit I wanted to model.

At this point I'm pretty confident with the weathering techniques and while there is always more to learn I feel that I can really do justice to the STuGs at this point. I was still undecided about the unit though, I have been flipping through a couple of books but in one of them there is a picture of a single STuG from the 343rd Battery. It has the heavy green and brown camo characteristic of the late war, and it has somewhat unusual side skirts which intrigued me. The picture indicated that these style skirts were unique to this particular unit (always a bonus in my mind). These are the standard skirts with the top of the skirting on the first three panels bent inwards. No idea why someone would do this, I don't see any gain to protection. From an armor perspective those skirts are quite thin from a metal working perspective that would take some serious effort by the maintenance unit. These STuGs also have a debris shield over the gun mantlet which would be easy to model as well (I hope anyway).

The question becomes can I modify the Rubicon skirts to reflect this interesting skirt modification? I figured I could sacrifice three panels without a problem, missing panels wouldn't be uncommon or one STuG (well probably the STuH) could go without skirts.

The first mark, time to get cutting

Pushing everything else to the back of the desk I proceeded to start cutting up the side skirts. The toughest one is the front panel. In addition to the bend in the armor it has been cut down to reveal the entire drive wheel, I guessing for maintenance reasons. Determining the point of the cut was a little difficult since I had already cut the skirts panels apart from each other (perhaps I should have waited till after the painting was finished to do this, will remember that when I get to the PzKfw IVs). I lined  everything up starting with the back skirt and its location relative to the return wheel and then sort of pushed everything in place till I got to the front panel and marked the positioning. The cut was made from the mark on the bottom of the panel to the upper right corner. So far so good, a small quick vertical cut to match the picture and the easy part was done.

Everything marked, cut and bent

I flipped the panel over and measured on 1/8th inch down from the top of the shield, well two marks one on the front edge and one on the back edge, and proceeded to make a shallow cut here. I worked slowly since I didn't want to cut the panel and reattach it I just wanted to bend it. I made shallow cuts and then widen it on the bottom edge with a angled cut. I placed the top edge on the workbench and gently pushed, if it didn't bend I made another shallow cut, until it bent into the position I wanted. I did the same thing on the center skirts, which were much easier. The bend in the front shield required another vertical cut so it would line up straight with the next panel.

From the front, the important side and it looks pretty good.

With that accomplished and the skirt panels lined back up for a quick visual check I was pleased enough with the result to do it on the rest of the skirting. I do wish I had found this picture before I had primed and based coated the STuGs! Live and learn, at least with the Jagdpanthers I already know which unit I want to represent and I planned the modifications in advance.

Looks good from here and the panels are behaving the way I envisioned them, kind of loose and out of place.

The real work begins.

World War II Project - A trio of Stugs + 1

 As you know from a recent post, I assembled a single Rubicon StuG IIIG a week or so ago. That particular one was built as a late war version with the saukopf mantlet with the late production muzzle for the 75mm 40/L48 cannon. Today I pulled out the other two kits that came in the bundle. The goal was to at least get all three built and ready for phase 2. In the middle of the first build I had to find a tool and I stumbled across yet another Rubicon StuG IIIG kit so I added that to today's pile.  At this point these are relatively old kits having been produced in 2015. I think they have held up very well and not being a StuG expert I didn't see anything that seemed "incorrect".

I decided that I would photograph the build this time in sequence with the assembly steps and try and give a few pointers. So here we go.

First up is today's work space:

My tool kit, cutting mat, drill bits (not really needed, but good for starting to drill out gun barrels), a bottle of liquid cement (Testors Model Master and if you are using super glue for these kits you are using the wrong stuff) and the two kits that I was intending to build that would blossom to three.

Step 1 Lower Hull:
I didn't really experience any problems in this area. Everything fits together quite nicely. 
Tip: when you are attaching the side plates with the running gear. Make sure you apply gently pressure downwards so that the sides don't ride up. If they ride up the back plate (B8) will not fit properly. If that piece doesn't fit properly then the upper hull won't fit well either.

All the parts you need to build the lower hull and tracks.

And all put together. For these builds I will leave the tracks off for some extra detailing and painting. I probably won't attach these till after most of the painting and weathering is finished.

Step 2 Upper Hull:
This portion of the build is also very straight forward. But there are a couple of gotcha moments, one of which took me all three builds to finally figure out the best way to do it.
Tip 1: Remember that the gun mount should not be glued or your gun won't elevate. I found that if I put piece C26 in first and pushed it so the back of the piece was pointed about 45 degrees downward it was much easier to glue piece C04 to the back of it. This should be the first part of Step 2 you do.
Tip 2: B11 was a nightmare piece for me on every build, I finally found a better way to attach it on the third build of the day. Make sure the make side of the piece is perfectly flat you need all the surface area you can get and there are no pins to glue into holes. This one just goes flat against the back of the upper hull. Look closely and you can see the spots where it should be glued. There are two injection marks on the back of this piece, this is what must be filed or sanded flat to get good contact. I put glue on the two ends and on the filter (which is in the center of this). I lined it up and then put pressure on the filter itself which seemed to be the only point where I could get good pressure on the end points. Once the glue has set a bit I could shift and place my fingers on the antenna portions and make sure they were firmly attached. A couple of actual attachment pins would make this a whole lot easier.

The parts, note the dreaded B11 piece that contains both antennas and the air filter for the rear hull

And assembled

Step 3 The Cannon (Our favorite part!)
Nothing terribly difficult here, just have to decide on the extra armor and the gun.
Tip 1: If you are going to drill out the muzzle (and it looks funny if you don't) this is the time to do it. I used a smaller bit (#63) first to get the holes started and then finished up with something closer to the shell size.

The parts with a choice between mantlets, muzzle brakes and armor.

And assembled

Step 4 The Roof
Important: The directions in my kits are all wrong in step 4, there is a correction on the Rubicon Website but I certainly didn't think to look there for anything like this. Three of my kits were just purchased from Rubicon Models so there are a lot of old instructions out there. Essential two of the diagrams are showing the incorrect roof. The Early Production roof should be B03 not B04 and the Mid Production roof should be B04 not B03 as stated. This kind of messed me up because I was trying to build at least one early, mid and late production version of the roof, fortunately since I ended up with four kits I was able to build all three variants.
Otherwise nothing tough about this build other than that there are no marks or pins for piece B12 which is optional. Just grab a reference from the web if you are a stickler for exact location which probably varied anyway.

The pieces, note that this is the mid production rough, which I thought was the early production roof because of the diagram in the instructions.

And assembled

Step 5 Rear Hull
There are a lot of different things you can do in this particular step. Just remember that there were probably dozens of different ways these vehicles came from the factories or were changed in the field. You can't ever by "wrong".
Tip 1: If you intend to use the rack and its extensions or even just the rack then its best to glue part B05 in place first and let it set. It has a tendency to slide while the glue dries. It does not have any locator pins or even slight indentations on the hull. The best indicator of where it should go is actually in the third little box titled Late Production. If you are going to add the extensions then its really important that this piece has set up so don't hurry. Once it is glued in place then I added the two extensions. Its easier to line up the the ends of the top crosspieces and let that guide the location of the back leg. Be patient.

Everything you need. Almost everything here can be considered optional depending on what year you are modeling.

And assembled. I have left the spare road wheels off so they can be painted separately.

Step Six Finishing Up
Lots of misc catch up detailing in this step. Side skirts are optional, smoke launchers are optional, you just have to make a decision on the top hatch and the spotting binoculars. Look around at some reference pictures, there are a lot of ways to add these pieces.

The pieces

And assembled. Again I'm leaving off the side skirts for now. This is the vehicle I made the roof mistake on so it really shouldn't have grenade launchers but I'm sure there were some that were issued that way or were added in the field. Also note that the tracks are still not attached. I just wanted to give you an idea of what it will look like at the end.

At the end of the day:

Just about all the tools I used. Two drills so I don't have to change bits, two different clippers, set of tweezers, files and the ever faithful x-acto knife variant (Gale Force Nine I think).

 

From left to right: StuH 42 early production with the saukopf mantlet, StuG III G mid production, StuG IIIG mid production (these two are very similar but have different muzzle brakes on the guns, not that anyone but an absolute purist could tell) and a StuG IIIG late production with the saukopf mantlet.

The next step will be to separate the side skirts and add some damage to them. I'm going to go in and mess with the front and back fenders as well, can't have them looking to factory fresh at this point. I also intend to adding two cables to at least two of these and maybe all four. Fortunately I was looking at the German Stowage pack from Rubicon and it has the tow cable eyes so I just need to add the wire. Also stowage will be painted and added after the vehicles have been painted and weathered.