Panzer IV H Platoon WIP

I finally made it back up to Ohio last weekend and my buddy Ethan and I exchanged Christmas gifts (a little bit late). He got me the Panzer IV H Platoon box set (GBX10) from Flames Of War. So I've been putting these together the last few nights. These really are time consuming to assemble, the schürzen especially are tricky. You have to attach 6 mounting brackets for each tank, and then the mounting rail for each schürzen. Although it is great fun to experiment with different sections missing. I used some of the extra sprue pieces to reinforce the schürzen, something I learned from some great articles here and here.
I wanted to take some pictures before I undercoated these to show the different pieces that all come together to make these. And I also did a little bit of conversion work. You'll notice the schürzen are only sticky-tack'd on, I am not going to glue them on until after painting.

The platoon commander is the right tank, I took a few close-ups but they didn't come out too well. The sculpt is amazing for the tank commander!


This is the biggest conversion I did- I hollowed out the drivers hatch, added the drivers head, and rebuilt the hatch with some carboard from the box.


Included was a little sprue of stowage. So this tank got loaded down with some extra gear- although I wouldn't want to be near this tank if stuff went down! I don't think the Jerry cans and fuel barrel would be very safe with bullets flying nearby! But they look pretty cool so I had to use them for at least one tank. If you click for the larger version you can see it on the left tank.


Same tanks from a different angle.


One of my biggest mistakes is looking through pictures of other people's Panzers on the Flames Of War forums before assembling these. I had extra pieces of track hanging all over the turrets. But after looking at a couple of hundred period photos of Panzers thanks to World War II Zone I realized that almost all of them had extra track on the top and underside of the front slope, but none on the turrets. So I had to snap off the pieces I had already glued on some of the turrets, and in the process of doing so, I ruined a little bit of the Zimmerit. Lesson learned!

Finishing up here's a shot of the platoon. Next up: undercoating!