[Czechoslovakia] 1945 - Taigen Panther

[Panzermechaniker]

Hey guys thanks for the compliments. I really appreciate them. I can't believe it took me 25 German Tamiya TS tri-colour paint jobs to finally find the wash that took out the kind of too dark yellow and also slight green tinge of Tamiya TS-3 and also changed TS-28 to more of a German olivegraun. Now Tamiya spray bombs are banned in Canada

But if anybody is still spray bombing in the free world either AK or Migs enamel Kursk Soil watered down are brilliant washes on German tri colour panzers

[Meter rat]

Now Tamiya spray bombs are banned in Canada
But if anybody is still spray bombing in the free world either AK or Migs enamel Kursk Soil watered down are brilliant washes on German tri colour panzers

Just wait until Trump, invades you. He will allow them again.

Terrific work, as usual. This almost, almost makes me rethink the whole thing with German Tanks.

[HERMAN BIX]

And the TS3 & other Tamy spray bombs are lacquer.
Just get an airbrush already !!
Ask Mr Chef.................hes learned the lesson of delay and denial

[Panzermechaniker]

Now Tamiya spray bombs are banned in Canada
But if anybody is still spray bombing in the free world either AK or Migs enamel Kursk Soil watered down are brilliant washes on German tri colour panzers

Just wait until Trump, invades you. He will allow them again.

Terrific work, as usual. This almost, almost makes me rethink the whole thing with German Tanks.

Well it is pretty hard to do a complete crap job on a Panther. I always consider them the best looking tanks so that makes up for bad paint jobs When I first started during Covid I was researching camo patterns for my first Panther and came across the 2 pages of these. The comment at the bottom is very funny and basically sums it up for me. If I had unlimited, space and resources I'd probably have a couple of hundred Panthers as there are so many cool camo schemes

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/thefgmfor ... 352/page-2

[Panzermechaniker]

And the TS3 & other Tamy spray bombs are lacquer.
Just get an airbrush already !!
Ask Mr Chef.................hes learned the lesson of delay and denial

I probably will eventually have to if I continue to buy even more tanks. But it will be dragged kicking and screaming. I like endless airbrush maintenance almost as much as soldering. I absolutely hate it.


One thing that is always a complete pain in the ass with Panther builds is the track cable. While if you look at the ones in the field it isn't inaccurate to not even have it wrapped on it's holder or just a complete mess I like to have it sort of wrapped properly. The Heng Long thing is so perfect it's ridiculous and Tamiya's solution is to give you a piece of string . So I have used scale cable from the likes of Aber and Schumo but getting it to even remotely to stay rounded is almost impossible. So on this build I decided just to use some solder wire. It is much easier to wind it around the holder and and easy to shape. You can score it as much as you like to get rid of the smooth appearance and in my case I just used paper clip wire bent to make the loops. Out on the field it is really hard to make out the join anyway but it would be easy enough to solder the loops to the wire. Anyway here is an image of it unpainted.

TC1.jpg (1.02 MiB) Viewed 1919 times

and a picture of it painted and temporarily fixed to the tank

TC2.jpg (1.19 MiB) Viewed 1919 times

[MrChef]

And the TS3 & other Tamy spray bombs are lacquer.
Just get an airbrush already !!
Ask Mr Chef.................hes learned the lesson of delay and denial

I probably will eventually have to if I continue to buy even more tanks. But it will be dragged kicking and screaming. I like endless airbrush maintenance almost as much as soldering. I absolutely hate it.

Learning to solder was a necessity. No, not so much fun but when I got the hang of it I ended up re-soldering bodge jobs that the elite technicians at Heng Long provide on a regular basis.

Airbrushing is Fun. The learning curve is the physical getting the hang of the tool and thinning the paint and air pressure combination. The actual cleaning and breaking down the airbrush became quick and second nature. And there's several levels of cleaning the brush. I used to do a full breakdown cleaning every time but learned that that's not necessary. The benefits outweigh the minor cleaning chore. It is virtually impossible to get the soft edge camouflage that an airbrush provides without significant time and effort (that I've seen done well ironically with water colors or Gauche) and it still won't be the same because they actually did paint tanks in the field with airbrushes.

I fought it for quite awhile but now that I made the plunge I'm more than pleased. And I am absolutely not an airbrush snob elitist as are prevalent in the airbrush modeling world. My gear all in was about $125.

[Panzermechaniker]

Not going to deny that airbrushing bands on tri colour panzers is a walk in the park compared to spray bomb/camo putty but it can be done with soft edges. I will never do this again though as each of the 12 yellow TS-3 bands was more stressful than watching my investment portfolio the last 2 days

IMG_8883.jpeg (2.2 MiB) Viewed 1369 times

[MrChef]

Not going to deny that airbrushing bands on tri colour panzers is a walk in the park compared to spray bomb/camo putty but it can be done with soft edges. I will never do this again though as each of the 12 yellow TS-3 bands was more stressful than watching my investment portfolio the last 2 days

That's well done and from my rattlecan experience Not easy to do. Not sure I could even do it, so kudos there

[Rob59]

You mean those yellow lines came out of a rattle can?
Hats off, very well done!
Rob.

[Panzermechaniker]

How I did it was to set each band up with camo putty. Spray a very light mist of TS-3. Then allow the camo putty to do it's usual glacier style move inwards and then spray the full coat. It was an absolute nightmare and expensive to do. The method had worked very easily with the TS-78 over the primer coat but the yellow bands took like 3 very stressful days. After doing the first band I wanted to just pick one of the other camo patterns that the Tamiya sheet showed but I figured I would try and complete it and if I messed it up I would just do a repaint. I managed to pull it off but I would never attempt doing something like that again with a rattle can. I'm done with tri colour German tanks anyway so any German vehicles I do going forward will be early war grey or Soviet tanks which can easily be done with Vallejo cans. It's easy to do some pre-shading with them and then various ways of weathering produce a good result. Too late now after 25+ paint jobs to invest in an airbrush