Another tank hunter (although technically more a motorized anti-tank gun) that I built is the Marder I, featuring a 75mm Pak 40 on a french chassis, built on the base of the Tracteur Blindé 37L (Lorraine), a French artillery tractor/armoured personnel carrier of which the Germans had acquired more than three hundred after the Fall of France in 1940.

The vehicle is one of the examples of using outdated chassis as a means to provide mobility to anti-tank guns until proper tank hunters were available. The Lorraine chassis was quite small, so a somewhat bulky looking superstructure was added, that only provided some protection against small arms.

The kit is from Tamiya, and while is has stunning details, it also shows some shortcomings. I think one aim of Tamiya is to make kits easy to build, so one of the issues here is the incredible thickness of the originally thin side walls, the gun shield and other parts. So without using PE parts, the finished kit will look somewhat toy-like. Therefore I added a PE set from Voyager, which has the complete fighting compartment included. I also added Friul tracks, as I like working with them, and the Tamiya plastic tracks are ok, but lack some detail. The other issue the kit is famous for is the wrong direction of the Tamiya tracks, but this could be rectified by changing the direction of the tracks and some bending.

I also added the original Tamiya figures included in the kit. They have very nice poses and very naturally looking folds, but otherwise have very little detail. I was starting to work on resin figures from Royal Model in parallel (the very nicely done Ferdinand crew), which clearly highlighted the differences in detail… but the Tamiya figures are ok.

One of the things I like about these open top vehicles is the level of detail to be shown, like the gun itself and stowage inside the fighting compartment.

Finally I put the vehicle on a base with some groundwork.