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Welcome, This is my attempt to build an armoured subject almost OOB. I so normally an aircraft builder so this is a little bot of new ground. Not my actual first but not many tracked vehicles under my belt recently. My club, Illawarra Plastic Modellers Association hosts the NSW Scale Model Show each May. We have shamelessly stolen a couple of competition building concepts from our near neighbours ACT Scale Modellers, altered them in name to protect the guilty and added it to our yearly show. In short the Panzer Tracks Trophy for the armour guys. The rules say the nominated kit must be OOB, with after market decals and barrel allowed. This year the nominated kit is the Tamiya 1/48 Panzer IV family. More details can be found here. I have chosen the 1/48 Tamiya Pzkpfw. IV Aust J (early) with Peddinghaus decals, RB 48B09 main barrel and RB MG 34 co axial and bow guns. Some references are necessary: The build is fairly straight forward and to be honest the minimal amount of AM allowed is a bit of a blessing. If you have not seen these kits, they have a cast full lower hull and some nicely moulded pieces. They come with four return rollers and the early exhaust, so you are a little restricted in choice for OOB: Thete is a choice of idler wheels and the road wheels and return rollers were cut from their sprues, held on a cocktail stick and rotated against some 400 grit sandpaper to remove the mould seams and scuff the tyres a bit: The turret schurzen were partially constructed and test fitted to enable alignment. They would be added later: The build moved fairly quickly from here on: Next came painting with RAL 7021 Panzer Grey lower hull and RAL 8012 Red Oxide Brown uppers: So that's up to date. Fairly happy with the work so far. I still have to draw the line with adding all the tools prior to painting but some of them are there. Next will be the tracks and then the fun stuff....weathering! Any tips or advice gladly accepted! Regards,