Heng Long Panther

[MonsieurTox]

It looks fantastic. I really like the look of the factory new suspensions!

[Ecam]

Darn (pardon the language) NICE!

[MrChef]

Nice work on your Panther Jeff.

Glad you came back and updated the pics, I think I may have stumbled over your old post missing the pics when I was researching mine.

[Panzermechaniker]

Nice work. Really like the scrapes and gouges on the schurzen plates also the scraping on the inner roadwheels. My Tamiya after a year of hard battling has had that happen naturally on the wheels but I 'll need to cover the yellow plastic colour now showing with some silver like you have

[jeff1101]

It looks fantastic. I really like the look of the factory new suspensions!

Thanks everyone for the kind words. If you have any specific questions about how I detailed mine please feel free to ask. As for the suspension, there were some inaccuracies in the way HL made their Panther, so it was difficult to correct it without some major modifications.

This was the Panther before I adjusted the suspension. As you can see I wasn't happy with the way it looked. The suspension just looked sad



To correct this, first I jacked up the transmission so the drive shaft would sit higher up in final drive housing. This I did by putting shims underneath the HL transmission foot.



You can really see it here on this slightly different profile shot.



The side effect is that now the sprocket insides were rubbing on the surface of the final drive housing. Careful adjustment of the thickness of the shims allowed me to still lift the drive shaft while clearing the sprocket from the final drive housing.

After I did this, the look improved but it still wasn't enough. So for the last step, I sawed the bottom of all openings of the swing arms so that the swing arms would clock even lower. With the bottoms removed, the swing arms no longer have a "stop" so what I did was I glued a metal strip which I got from an old wiper blade (after removing the rubber) at the bottom of the tank.





You can see the metal strip in this zoomed image (highlighted)

[Herr Dr. Professor]

Metal from an old wiper blade…that’s a clever way to scrounge useful materials, sir!

[MonsieurTox]

Thank you for the "how to". The strip from an old wiper blade is indeed very smart !

[airmancurran1]

This is looking great so far. I like the creative use of alternative materials.