). So what to do ? I know let's start another tank conversion. This time it's the turn of the Stug III. I have the Asiatam metal hull and late return rollers on order for Xmas so I thought why not upgrade to a later model as one does. After asking round about a few things and checking the prices of bespoke conversion kits on the bay I decided to order a replacement gun shield for the loader from Forgebear, as I have "misplaced the origional 
somehow. I have rebuilt the mantlet to the later pigshead type by simpley dremmeling off the sharp corners to a more rounded profile. I also removed the front plate off the origional mantlet. Then all I did was rebuild the mantlet using Milliput to get the aproxamate profile. I have put in an alloy tube to allow for a battle system IR emmiter to be mounted where the co-axial machine gun came through on the full sized Stug. A little oversized in comparison the the real thing but I can live with that. After undercoating I sprinkled good old bicarbonate of soda over the still wet paint for a rough cast texture. Next came the shot deflector in front of the commanders cupola. This was a new experance for me as I don't normaly "scratch" build anything, but this time I had no other ( cheap ) option. So i marked off where the shot deflector fitted in front of the cupola and cut out a cardbord template. Then I put the mixed milliput on the template and trimmed it to the V shape making sure it was thinner at the point of the template than at the rear. Then I put the template onto the Stug and roughly moulded and trimmed it to the shape and required thickeness. I used images from missing lynx .com as refrence. Here are a few pictures as to where I am at the moment . Comments as always welcome 
Alan
- Reshaped mantlet and shot deflector
- resized Stug pic 2.jpg (32.43 KiB) Viewed 3489 times
. So it will be a nice steady job. Might even have a go at scratching a remote machine gun and getting the loaders hatch to open side to side rather than front and rear. If that don't work out to well then I will just keep the armoured machine gun mounting origional as well as the hatch and have done with it. As to going out to play in the rain forget it Hatakashi my friend it's COLD as well as wet and windy and I already have the start of the sniffles ( everyone say AHHHHHHH ). To be honest I am a fair weather tanker at the best of times 
Today I will be having a go at striping the old cammo scheme from the top hull and metal wheels. More to follow soon
