Updates 9/8/2013 - Priming and painting the swing arms
Thanks for kind words maxmeker and PainlessWolf. PainlessWolf I have also read your build thread and your Panther looks mighty fine already with the details that you have added.
As for the build skills, I too started a total novice with scratch building parts and assembling PE but I have built up my confidence while working with them with the over a year I have been customizing this tank. Just take your time, don't hurry and if you make a mistake don't rush to fix it. Let it sit for a couple of days so you can come up with a plan of action.
I always think of it this way, we all do this hobby to pass the time. If you finish your build quickly what else will you do to pass the time after?
(As for me, I don't want to buy another tank - no more space to put it in the house without the wife getting into a fit)
Also having a build thread and regularly posting to it
, helps tremendously in improving your skills.
Presenting to a particular audience and knowing someone else is reading your posts forces you to organize your work and lay out your build steps into some kind of coherent order.
Unfortunately all the skills I build up during the detailing phase of the tank is over.
I am now again entering yet another uncharted territory.
So with that, here are the result of my little experiment. I decided to do some test painting on the swing arms first. At least if I make a mistake on the swing arms, it would not be seen as the swing arms are well hidden by the road wheels.
But first I had to prime the swing arms. I washed the swing arms in soap so the primer can get a better grip.
Since multiple coats of paint add thickness to the parts, I taped over the part of the swing arm that slides into the road wheels. This will prevent that part from getting paint and thus hinder road wheel rotation. I also masked off the screw holes of the swing arms using blue tac for the same purpose.
With that done laying the primer is an easy task.
With the swing arms primed. I carefully painted it using my pre-mixed red oxide color. I also painted 2 of the swing arms using my modulation color (dark grey) to see how it would look when painted with the red oxide color. I then sprayed a layer of Kleer as a protection layer. The result are below.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures before I sprayed the Kleer so what you see is the final color. As you can see the 2 swing arms on the top got the modulation color of dark grey before the red oxide color was applied. This has turned to a sort of dark brown which surprisingly I like.
So parts of the tank that has just primer on it will turn reddish red oxide and parts of the tank that got a spray of dark grey modulation color will turn to a brownish red oxide color.
I also switched to a new lens in all of my photographs from this point on as I think this new lens renders colors more accurately than my macro lens which I used during the build phase.
From these results, I then picked the redder, brighter hue color as my red oxide color. I wanted the brighter, lighter color as adding Kleer will add contrast and darken it. Adding weathering effects will also again darken the color further so I wanted a lighter color from the start so that it doesn't get too dark that the details of the tank will not bee seen when its finished.
Red oxide is a complicated color to simulate and here are my ingredients for it. (I used Tamiya acrylics for this paint.)
Batch that got rejected
20 parts - flat red XF-7
1 part - buff XF-57
1 part - red brown XF-64
Batch that got selected
20 parts - flat red XF-7
1 part - yellow XF-3
1 part - red brown XF-64
The yellow adds a orange hue to the red and the red brown adds a tinge of brown. (But darkens the color considerably).
Here are swing arms painted.
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Couldn't help it as I had to pick up the tank and hold it at the bottom. Anyway I'll just spray Kleer on this to protect it as this is the final color of the tank at the bottom sides anyway.
And in fact the last months of 1944 saw the greatest number of panther tanks produced by these 3 assembly firms ever in the course of the war. 
