Over the summer break, I finished the Marder II scene. I found a historical picture showing a Marder driving through a sunflower field quite inspiring, so I built and painted quite a lot of Aber sunflowers (I lost count, but I think I added 60 or 70 if them). They look ok, but only if you look at them from their front side.

I also added two Alpine figures, depicting tankers in summer look, only wearing shirts. After all, the built took some time, as expected for an open vehicle, but the wealth of details really looks interesting, and you also get a good feeling for the real vehicle. The 75mm PaK looks quite big and very dominant on the rather fragile Panzer II chassis, I think this impression is even more evident if you look at a Marder I (the PaK on top of a even smaller French Hotchkiss or Lorraine chassis).

Below I added some pictures of the finished model.

In the meantime, I added the ammunition boxes on the back of the vehicle, as well as the drivers compartment. I also finished the side armors, which were painted and weathered inside, and then added to the hull. Before I will mount the main gun, I decided to finish the running gear first to minimize the need for handling the model with the gun mounted. Due to the very open construction, the build is a constant iteration from building to painting to building again.

So I started to add mud and dust, and also worked on a set of Friul tracks.

The mud texture consists of a mixture from acrylic paint, artists’ acrylic medium, real earth and plaster. After having tried some readily mixed diorama mud products, I am quite sure that these are also based on simple artists’ acrylic medium. So it is a much more flexible approach to create this on your own, and also the earth texture can be varied and better controlled by mixing it yourself. The plaster is also a quite useful ingredient, as it helps to add texture as well and guarantees a dead matt finish of the mud.

I continued to work on the Marder, and started to paint and weather the interior. I also sculpted a driver figure, which I placed on the drivers’ seat. Unfortunately, the figure will be mostly invisible after further closing the drivers’ compartment.

This is the current state of the project.

The third German tank hunter I am going to build is one of the earlier ones, a Marder II. This vehicle is more a self propelled anti-tank gun, based on the carriage of the Panzer II and either a Russian 7.62mm gun (Sd Kfz 132) or the German 75mm Pak 40. As such, it has an open fighting compartment, with a lot of details to be shown, and only limited protection for the crew. Despite this and the very high silhouette that made hiding and/or camouflaging difficult, it was a successful interim solution, until “real” tank hunter like the Jagdpanzer 38 (Hetzer) became available.

The build is based on a Dragon kit (6423), with PE parts from Voyager (base set and fenders) and Friul tracks. The quality of the Dragon kit is mixed, with some very detailed parts (e. g. the Pak itself), but a lot of detail lacking inside the vehicle. Also the usual upper/lower hull part split really makes no sense for this vehicle, so the first step consists of cutting the upper hull into pieces, and cutting of the fenders.

I also bought a Nuts&Bolts volume on this vehicle, which is very helpful as it contains a lot of reference photos from museum vehicles, that help a lot to understand the build of the original vehicle, and which details have to be added. Together with some more pictures available on the Internet, I was pretty confident in having enough references available. So I started to build the first stage of the interior, that then will be painted and weathered, before the remaining parts will be built and added later. And as said above, I needed some time to really understand and being able to replicate the original build.

The pictures then show the state right before the first round of painting:

As can be seen, the engine housing is more or less the original kit part, but the fuel tank has to be build from scratch, as the original part has way too thick sides. The gearbox also can be used without a lot of modifications, but around it and on the sides of the interior, a lot of detail has to be added. I also started to rebuild the upper part of the drivers’ compartment from sheet styrene, as the original part is also way too thick and completely misses the internal structure that will be at least partly visible from outside. I also plan to open the drivers’ viewing hatch, which will be also much easier using scratch built parts.