Monday, April 24, 2017

Warlord Games Panther Ausf. A plastic kit Build Review

As part of the Wheels of Steel offer by Warlord Games, I got myself the plastic  Panther A, that I wanted for quite some time.

The tank comes in the standard paper box containing 2 grey sprues, one sheet instructions manual and a decal sheet. The decals sheet was missing in my box, but the good folks at Warlord sent me a replacement one

With this tank I've decided to build/paint it a bit differently and to keep the running gears and tracks separate until the final weathering stage. Thus I've skipped the first step and built pretty much everything else. More on this once I start painting and weathering the Panther

As I prefer my vehicles to look a bit battered, I've removed some of the side skirts - this required some sanding and filling due to the attachment system - you can see someone was thinking here, so the skirts should survive some rough wargaming. I have also cut down the front mud guards - these were missing quite often and I wanted the muddy tracks to be visible.

Side skirts attachment system - you need to remove these


Cutting down the mud guards


Once this was dealt with, I've glued together the lower and upper part of the hull - which was a mistake, because you need to glue in the front machine gun first - it's doable later on (as I did), but it's better to do it before gluing the hull together. However the machine gun is a bit too small for the hole, so in the end I've filled it with some green stuff and then pressed the MG into it.

MG hole filled with green stuff


Rest of the build should be pretty straightforward, however the manual isn't really helping here - you need to study the final pictures to understand where should these go to, so go slow here!

Enhanced instructions


Construction of the turret is over in few minutes, I've skipped the "don't glue this with that, so you can elevate the gun" and glued the gun solid. Also I've kept the commander's MG separate for now, so it doesn't get broken during painting.




And that's pretty much it, in the end an hour of pleasant modelling, all of the parts fit really well and the tank looks awesome - can't wait to paint it next. Much recommended!


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