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.
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Panels bent, the second set went much faster.
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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.
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| Filing and cleaning up the obnoxious Squadron Green putty. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| Panels ready for painting. They will be much easier to paint mounted to the popsicle sticks. |
