Hobbyboss Pzkpfw I Ausf F (VK18.01)-Late 1/35

[FishBowlMan]

After a couple of months away from the bench, it was about time to pull my finger out and get on with something. All my other projects are at the painting / weathering / pondering a diorama stage, and I really wanted to build something, so I pulled this out of my stash:



Its a lovely little kit with no flash and very few seam lines. The fit is beautiful and the only filler I (should have) used was for a slight gap for the glacis plate, and to fill in a bit of over-zealous sanding on the rear fenders.

I originally wasn't going to post build pictures here, but decided I may as well put a few up. There's not an awful lot of photos during construction. I mainly took pictures so I could identify places that I had missed while airbrushing, etc, so please forgive the quality.


ASSEMBLY

There's a nice little sheet of PE included in the kit including the grills for the engine. Its just occurred to me that as no engine is provided, maybe I should have painted the interior black or else the tan plastic may be visible inside. Hey ho!






The tools are pretty decent. Shame there weren't any PE clamps included though.


My 1st experience with link and length tracks. These needed a fair chunk of clean-up and I made a real hash of assembling one of the runs. I guess I'll rethink my diorama idea slightly and have the tank sitting up against a wall.



PAINTING

There are 2 colour schemes suggested. One is an unspecified unit from Kursk in 3-tone camo, and the other is an unspecified unit in panzer grey - possibly assigned to a training school. Shame hobbyboss don't seem to provide more detailed info on their kits. I'm going for the latter scheme.

I sprayed Vallejo German Panzer Grey primer (74.603) all over, and left it at that.




The camera flash has really lightened the grey in the pictures as the actual vallejo finish is incredibly dark - almost black. Some sources on the web say that this is probably a truer representation of panzer grey than is usually portrayed. May give it a filter later, or possibly some pigments to vary the surface a little. I'll decide when the decals are on and I've given it a matt cote.


DETAILS ADDED. READY FOR DECALS

Painted and fitted the tools and other bumflufferies. The only real thing of note was that I'm quite impressed with the way the jack block turned out (if you ignore the shine from the Future). I painted a couple of coats of Tan Yellow (70.912). When this dried, I went over it a couple of times with a thin wash of Smoke (70.939). There's already quite a nice wooden plank texture moulded on the plastic so that was one less thing to worry about.


The tracks were sprayed with Black (70.950), given a heavy drybrush of Natural Steel (70.864) and then a wash with Sepia Ink or Inky Sepia as vallejo like to call it (72.091)


Need to paint the headlights!




Need to paint the tail light!


After the painting, I sprayed a few light coats of Future at about 10psi and we're now curing overnight ready for some decals.

So that's the current progress. Comments, suggestions, criticism are all welcome.

[Nige99]

Nice little kit with some cracking detail.

[Munch94]

shes looking looking good mate
good to know it goes together well as id bought the kit and always wondered about it
can't wait to see what you do with it next

[gustavlekstal]

Looking great! And the tank got a sence of humor. A bot odd and funny looking

[FishBowlMan]

Cheers for the comments, guys. Sorry for not responding for a week or so, but work's been pretty hectic. One of my jobs is to deliver parcels and it seems the pre-xmas rush has started early this year!

Nice little kit with some cracking detail.

Yeah I'm really impressed with this one, Nige. First hobbyboss kit I've made and promptly went out and got another one. The PE parts really do add that little something to it without going into "super-detailing mode"

shes looking looking good mate
good to know it goes together well as id bought the kit and always wondered about it
can't wait to see what you do with it next

Thanks, Munch. I'd definitely recommend it. Can't vouch for the accuracy, but from the limited pictures I've seen on the net, they've captured this one pretty well I think.

Looking great! And the tank got a sence of humor. A bot odd and funny looking

Cheers, Gustav. This thing does look strange. I was quite surprised at just how wide this turned out to be. I was expecting something a lot narrower and was shocked when I got the tracks and fenders attached and saw it sitting there fully built!


Not a huge amount of progress due to the busy week, but I managed to get the decals on along with a further coat of future to seal them in.

I wanted to try and break up the monotone surface a bit, so attacked everywhere with a dot-filter of darkish grey mixed randomly from some cheapo black and white oil paints. A couple of pics from last Thursday after the filter had dried for an hour or so:





I was quite pleased with the variation in colour, but the effect was too streaky for my liking, so I spent a very theraputic hour today removing some of the paint using a flat brush moistened with white spirit. There's still a couple of areas I'm not too happy with, but I'll check again tomorrow and adjust things a bit more.













Its still a bit too "brush strokey" for my liking so I may try attacking it with a moistened cotton bud for a bit of variety.

[felisbarcinonensis]

Looking super cool buddy!

[Hillbilly]

Very nice,clean build....and yea,kind of an odd looking tank

[AchtungPanzer]

Looks not bad mate Keep it up

[PaulAyrey]

A great little kit, you are doing a first class job with it!

[Donkeywalloper]

John

God, I love it.
What a super little tank and build.
I have one of these under my bench and couple more type Pz Kpfw 1's.
I really have to give one a go.
Sorry about parcel thing.
We at work are already starting to see a massive build up of parcel deliveries via you chaps at Fed-Ex, Yodel, UPS etc.
Amazon must be raking it in.
Year upon year, ever since we brought in a nominal 10p (Voluntary) for each parcel delivered personally for employees, the yearly amount has shot up (we are unusual in that we do accept personnel mail at work).
My B-in-L works for Fed-ex and he has a colossal round in the sticks so I do feel for you.
I digress though mate.....
Great job,

John

[FishBowlMan]

A very belated Thank You for the comments, folks and sorry once again for taking so long to respond

The 3 months (yes, 3 months ) leading up to Christmas have been insanely busy for the parcel delivery companies. I probably had 2 1/2 to 3 times the volume that I was delivering in 2012 and 2013 and it was just relentless. 2013's xmas build-up started around the middle of November, whereas 2014 kicked off from the beginning of October and it just did not stop! I got to the stage of work, eat crap, sleep, repeat. Even on the few Sundays I was free I was too tired to properly catch up with the forums, let alone go anywhere near the bench.
A week back at my parents over Xmas has helped recharge the batteries (as well as catching up on some valuable drinking and eating proper food ) so I'm looking forward to getting some proper modelling time in again.

Got to try and remember where I've got to on some of my builds - one of the reasons I've enjoyed documenting them on the forum as it provides me with a good refresher a few months after I've even looked at some of them.

Happy New Year folks! Have a great 2015 and hopefully I'll be back soon with some updates.

[jbellos1]

My goodness that is a great looking build! Cute, funny looking weapon of war.

[Donkeywalloper]

Great to hear your back in the land of the semi living John. I thought about you specifically over the Christmas time when all the crap kicked off with the Yellow and Green company.
Those poor buggers really did get shafted.
Every year for the past ten years, we have excepted (unusually, as most companies will not except personal post) all employees personal mail and parcels.
This year 2014, has been insane. I have never seen so many parcels.
We decided some years ago to ask employees to contribute 10p (this went to our designated charity of SCOPE).
Let's just say this year we have processed 3000 parcels.
The country just started "Clicking" on the Internet from August in the run up to Christmas.
Anyhoo, great to see your back with us.
Can't wait to see what you offer as your 2015 build?
Look after yourself John.

John

[Munch94]

Good to hear your back mate. I can only imagine how busy it must have been, hopefully you were paid handsomely for your hard work. Looking forward to see what you have in store for 2015