Now I finished the last of my three Marder kits. It depicts a Marder III H from Leibstandarte at Charkow in early 1943. I got inspired from a picture showing a vehicle from that unit there with a lot of personal items stowed on it, so I tried to replicate this. I also added quite a few figures from Alpine.
The kit was from Dragon, with added PE parts from Voyager.
Building three different Marders in parallel, I now also finished the Marder III M with the German 75mm PaK and the chassis of the Panzer 38(t) specially adapted for self propelled guns. The kit is from Tamiya, with Aber PE added. I also added three injection moulded figures from Miniart.
One issue with all the kits of the different Marders is the thickness of the side walls. The real ones were quite thin, only designed to protect from shrapnel and small arms’ fire, so the replicated walls are way too thick. There are some PE walls available, but I liked to preserve the nicely detailed outer side. So I cut the wall sections from the kit apart, and carefully sanded down the individual parts to scale thickness. One benefit of this is getting rid of sink marks, but all the interior detail has to be added back by either using PE parts or scratch building with styrene profils and nuts.
As the other Marder III builds, the process was greatly assisted by the respective volumes from the Nuts & Bolts publication series.
I spent the last months building three different Marder III Panzerjaeger, that are all now almost finished. The first build to show here is the Tamiya Marder III (Sd Kfz 139), which is the first interim solution tank hunter on the Panzer 38 (t) chassis, featuring a modified Russian 7.62 mm field gun as main weapon.
I added an interior from Royal Model, as I wanted the hatches to be opened, and also quite some details from the interior are still visible through the gun mount. I also used a barrel and two PE sets from Aber. For the base, I added one Alpine DAK tanker, together with two Panzer Art figures.
Overall, I enjoyed the build very much, also it is fun to have a rather busy model in the end, with all the interior of the fighting compartment being visible. But putting it all together takes quite a while, with intermitting steps of building, painting, building again and frequent touch ups.
fieldgrau - military scenes in scale 