Meng Panther A late WIP & finished

Spanjaard
nice looking panther 🙂

Alex
Very nice camo and weathering!

Rene Scheiblich
I'm amazed at your Panther🙂 looks great. What did you use for the thick mud?
Do you plan to put on a dio to emphasize the working suspension? 🙂

Btw: my next build will be a plane. The first in a looong while. I hope it'll turn out to be a piece of cake😉

Dec Roberts
Looking good, how did the zimmerit go down? i have this kit with zimmerit pack 2 but never used this type before any tips would be welcome.

Dennis
@Spanjaard: much appreciated, I felt like I needed to step away from fast, pointy things for a bit to broaden my skills 😄

@Alex: thanks, much appreciated

@Rene: I used Gunze's Mr Weathering Paste Mud Brown mr-hobby.com/en/itemDetail.php?iId=1366

Pretty cool stuff! Easy to work with and looks (to me) surprisingly convincing! They have a few more colors and a clear wet look paste too, that you can all mix to your desire!

A dio is not planned at this time - I only recently returned to the hobby and feel like I have to build up solid experience on the models themselves, first! 😄

@Dec Roberts: It went down pretty much without issues! I put it down on bare plastic, and the usual tips apply: clean, grease-free surface, setting solution (I am using Gunze's Mr Mark Setter / Mr Mark Softer, they are great!), hot water and you're pretty much golden!

I had to use a tiny, tiny dab of Tamiya Extra Thin at the edges of the decals on some complicated shapes (gun mantlet) to get them to stick 100%, but that's about it! 🙂

Michael Hickey
Sweet build and paint job, well done.👍

Rene Scheiblich
Cool stuff! I've tried a selfmade clearcoat/pigment mud, didn't look half as nice 🤔
Mark setter and softer are nice too. Hadn't guessed that they would on such big and rather thick decals too!

You've made a great comeback. 🙂

Dennis
Thanks Rene, I am a bit surprised myself that dabbling in airbrush and stuff would actually yield nice results! Today's products are better than my old old Revell brush painting in the early 90ies, too, of course! 😄

The Decal solutions are magic, really - helped me a lot in the bigass F-4J decals of the kit I finished by the end of last year 😄

Martin Oostrom
Nice result.
You better get started on dios as well. It's hard, but.... your models will be even better and then you put them on a crappy first ever dio? It's better to evolve both skills simultaneously 😉

Rene Scheiblich
I know what you mean Dennis, I'm sort of in the same boat (though not as advanced 🤔 ). Started with brush painting revell stuff too. It was the easiest-to-get stuff 😄

To me the whole issue of building dios is sort of intimidating. There's so much to it.
But what you're saying makes sense Martin 🙂

Martin Oostrom
Try, fail, try again. Just like building a model for the first time, or airbrushing 😄

Spanjaard
when i started, revel was not the easiest... was the only 😛
you can start with very simple models.... a airfield tarmac, a bit of grass on a corner, a nice fighter or chopper... voilá, first dio 🙂

Rene Scheiblich
I might just try that. Starting with something really simple like spanjaard suggested. Plaster and paint should suffice for a runway 😄 Missing a plane with extended landing gear though 😛

Martin Oostrom
Take plaster and some brown paint. Mix and sculpt. Some shading and dirtying it up and voila, a Panther in the mud.

Rene Scheiblich
I'm not the Panther builder.😉 just hijacking😄

Martin Oostrom
Naughty you. I knew that of course, ahem, I could have known.

Lennart
Why did you buy the "Late Production Tracks & Movable Running Gear Parts" (sand color) but still used the default tracks(black color)?

Dennis
Hey Lennart - the Suspension Kit had black track links. They maybe changed it to sand with the release of the Jagdpanther.

(they were also identical to the kit links, which in hindsight feels a bit like a rip-off, but given that the kit aint too expensive I can live with that😉 )

Lennart
Oh ok. I have the same kit and mine are sand color. Also the chain links are connected to the sprues only on two point (the normal one are connected on 6 points) They look like this: imgur.com/a/z78tBtd

Dennis
Ah I see! Looks like the later batches of the kit got improved track links. Mine seriously was identical to the basic track links in the kit itself. 🙂