Back again – sorry for the delay in posting, but our living room lamp blew out and I haven’t had an evening with sufficient light to do any work.
Tonight I’m going to be talking a bit about the suspension, some pre-painting on the wheels, and more about the roof options.
The Suspension
On the Trumpeter model, the suspension units for the E25 are pretty simple – they are three-piece elements (two sides and an end-cap) that end up looking deceptively similar. As well, there are extra pieces on the sprues to make more suspension units – but only enough endcaps for the exact number – which initially threw me off as I ended up with too many for one side and not enough for the other, but once I discovered my error it was quick to remedy. Fortunately I figured out what was up before the endcap’s glue set, so I was able to remove it and apply it to a new unit.
The assembled sides, minus endcap
End-on view, showing axle extension
The first step of the kit instructions will have you building a total of twelve suspension units, and the second step will have you plugging them into the lower hull. The instructions don’t, however, explain which ones go to which side (not really necessary, as they really only fit one way). Just lay them out once assembled so that you have your six for left and six for right grouped properly. It was also helpful for me to put them in order – each suspension unit has either a long or short axle extension, as the wheels will be interleaved with one another. The one shown above is a long axle unit, with no endcap. Once on the hull, they are placed in order long, short, long, short, long.
Once you plug them into the hull (and the pic below also shows some extra parts installed), it’ll look like this:
Note the placement of the axle extensions – long-short-long-short-long
Wheels
I haven’t attached the wheels yet, probably will save them for late in the build, but I did pre-paint them on their sprue to go with the ambush camouflage I’ll be using. Here’s how I went through it:
First, black primer. Second, German armor yellow as a base color (I had a spray can of Flames of War “war paint” in the right color available, otherwise I’d have air-brushed them with middlestone or something similar. Here’s the sprue with the base color:
German Armor Yellow, Done.
Next step, I chose to keep two of the wheels on each side in the base color, so I masked two wheels and their hubcaps with standard masking tape. After that, I decided I’d do two wheels on each side in green, so I hit the next four wheels and caps with German Green.
Green Wheels, Done.
Lastly, I masked those off and hit the remaining two wheels and caps with a dark German Armor brown (pretty close to a chocolate brown).
Brown, Done.
I set the whole sprue aside, I’ll deal with it and the tracks later.
Roof Options
I was pretty sure early on that I’d be building a model with the machine-gun turret installed, but I went ahead and built both roofs (leaving off the unique parts for the one I was going to keep and use) just for completeness. Conveniently, all the parts which are separate for the two options are kept on different sprues.
Each pair of options is found on a separate sprue, so if you know which you’re going to be using, you can set the other aside.
For the non-turreted version, I discovered that it was pretty easy for me to make the mistake of assuming that everything was going to be sealed up – not so fast! The main hatch is actually a double-hatch, and the smaller of the two is described in an open position in the instructions (for the record, if you want to build the kit in buttoned-down mode, the parts fit perfectly).
Roof Option 1 – with binos attached. Note the messy rim around the hatches – I was too quick to act and glued them in buttoned-down mode before realizing the binos extended up through the smaller hatch.
This stuff is in step 9 of the instructions, and it’s the first part. There are two pics of the roof, the left one is of the top and the right is of the bottom. One tricky piece to assemble is the binoculars – the binocs are cast as being folded straight up, and they slot into a retaining bracket which will get glued up against the underside of the roof.
The Binoculars attached to their mounting bracket
The mounting bracket for the binos glues to the underside of the roof, right next to the hatch.
Note the positioning of the binos relative to the hatches.
Once attached this way, it can be difficult to find a way to place the piece somewhere that won’t deform the binos, but the corner of the box happens to be a perfect spot.
Just set it aside and let it dry a while.
Unlike option 1, option 2 is a bit more straightforward. The MG turret fits clean (though I did trim the retaining flanges a little bit to make it swivel a bit more easily), and all the bits are pretty easy. I’ll push a few pics of it up on my next post. I’m also starting in on some resin and photo-etch extras, so I’ll cover a couple of those on the next post too.
The small turret is a pure fiction. Originaly an early Doyle drawings show this in one of the Spielberger books – where I believe there is a mix of a Porsche design, schwerer kleiner Panzerkampfwagen and the E-25 design. Later resin kit producers Cromwell and Accurate Armour design picked up the idea – and hence the small MG turret. On later drawings by Doyle this turret has been ommited.
Cool stuff, thanks for the input – even on a fictional tank, it’s good to have real data behind the intent of the original designers. Thanks again!
The small turret is a pure fiction. Originaly an early Doyle drawings show this in one of the Spielberger books – where I believe there is a mix of the Porsche design, schwerer kleiner Panzerkampfwagen and the E-25. Later resin kit producers Cromwell and Accurate Armour design picked up the idea – and hence the small MG turret. On later drawings by Doyle this turret has been ommited, which is close to the original E-25 design drawings.