When it came it was all in pieces, but I knew that from the listing. The motors, sprockets, tracks, headlights, and idlers had never been mounted on it. It came with a bent barrel, but a replacement was also in the box. The servo recoil and elevation was preinstalled, but there were no instructions on anything else. I pulled a Taigen rotation unit, volume control, and speaker out of the spares box mounting them in the tank. I had the Hooben power switch from my ZTZ-99A build laying around so it got a new XT60 connector and it got thrown in the PZIII. I wanted enough room to mount my "go to" Li-Ion 2S2P battery packs and surprisingly there is a lot of room in this little tank. It came with some strange brackets which I decided were used to mount the upper to the lower. The only problem was there were no holes to mount the bracket so I drilled some right above the mounts for the idlers and I was in business. I printed myself an apple base I found on Thingiverse, fabricated an apple cable, cut a rectangle hole below the commander's hatch (in the metal which was a PITA BTW), drilled a bigger hole for the emitter tube in the mantlet, installed an IR LED, and the battle system was fully functional. I had some pre-wired SMD LEDs I dropped into the front headlights and used some Testors clear plastic glue to make some lenses for the open slits. Over two evenings all of the other electronics got wired up and tested. This is probably the fastest build minus paint I've ever done.
I may do some more detail work on it in the future. I haven't quite decided. German tanks seem to have a lot of detail stuff - much more than Russian tanks. For the time being I think it's going to stay unpainted while I decide. I'll take it out to the battlefield and run it. I wanna see what this little rat rod can do.
Inside shot:
