Sd. Kfz 232 (Fu) (8 Rad)***FINISHED***

[PeterB]

As my first 4 "easy" builds are either finished or getting close it is time to start on my final, slightly more complicated build. I have already built one of the Roden 232 (8 Rad) kits as a normal armoured car but this will be the version equipped with a longer range radio.

As you will note there are 2 upper hulls on the sprue, the one on the right being for the one equipped with a short 75mm gun, but that is for another kit in their range and this will be with a turret. Markings are provided for one in Russia and another in Italy in the late war "gelb" finish together with a Romanian one, but I may just build this in desert colours as my gelb has run out! It is not a difficult kit, but there are a lot of small fiddly parts with not very clear locations and the "undercarriage" on my last one was hard work and was not too well aligned so I will have to take more care this time round.

 

Pete

[PeterB]

Roden kits seem to have a lot of parts, some small and thin such as the drive shafts, crammed together on the sprues and difficult to get off without breaking them but so far I have managed. As I mentioned earlier, I had problems with the running gear on the previous kit and as you can see from the instructions there is a lot of room for misalignment.

There are 2 four wheel units to make and excluding the actual wheels they comprise 18 parts each. Normally I would paint them on the sprues but I found last time that caused problems gluing them together so I have built them without painting.

The plastic being black they do not photograph well! Normally I would let the glue set on the various sub assemblies before pressing on but due to the anticipated problems I worked on them whilst the glue was still a bit soft and they were a real fiddle. However they eventually seemed to align fairly well and I managed to dry fit them to their locations on the lower hull so they may be a bit better than my previous attempt - it might actually sit of all 8 wheels with a bit of work.

 

I have described this as a more difficult build than my 4 previous ones and to an extent that is correct, but I have now done what is likely to be the worst part. There are plenty more small bits and pieces, lights etc to go on but the build should be relatively straightforward, though the locations of many parts are more than a bit vague.

 

As to the finish I am disinclined to buy any more paint just for one kit, the cost of living being what it is at the moment. I am out of the late war "dunkelgelb" and my old stock of Humbrol Authentic Afrika Korps sand has also dried up which is a pity as all my previous German desert vehicles are painted in that. I do have 2 tins of Colourcoats AK colours - early sand and late sand brown and I may try one of them.

 

Pete

[PeterB]

Back in the 1960s and 1970s I painted all my British, US and German tanks in Humbrol Authentic - I used Testors OD on the Airfix T-34s and JS-3. Later I found a number of paints which seemed more accurate so I changed to them and in some cases repainted my old kits so that they looked the same, but except for using several shades of Panzer Grey I left the German ones in Humbrol HM2 for the desert and the late war ones in their Dunkelgelb. When the old "Authentic" paint ran out I switched to the alternatives recommended by Humbrol and I have now found a new tin of Hu 63 "Sand" which matches the paint on my old kits so I will use that. It is a bit more orange that the Colourcoats version of Afrika Korps early sand but I will stick with it for continuity - actually it matches quite well with a very poor quality colour pic in one of my books which shows tanks being unloaded from a ship.. 

So I have painted the bits of the hull and wheel units that will be difficult to get at and stuck them together - I will need to go over the visible bits again as the first coat is a bit yellow though not as bad as in the above pic! I will glue all the bits (32 of them - Roden are generous with detail) on the lower hull and mudguards next before painting them.

 

Pete

Edited November 7, 2022 by PeterB

[PeterB]

Whilst looking at the 3 builds currently on my workbench a thought struck me. All have well sloped armour, but the Germans did not do the same with any of their tanks until the Panther, Several of my books say that it was not until they first came across the T-34 in Russia that they decided to apply sloping armour to tanks and yet they had been using it on the likes of the Sd Kfz 222, 232 and 251 since the mid 1930's which strikes me as a bit odd. Maybe it was to do with production problems with thicker armour plate, or perhaps they thought it was a good idea against small calibre enemy weapons but not as effective against anti tank guns until they saw their 37mm and 50mm shells bouncing off T-34's? Of course sloping armour does not only deflect shells better but also effectively makes it "thicker" - when a shell travelling horizontally hits a sheet of armour say 5cm thick and angled at 45 degrees to the vertical, it actually has to go through about 6cm to penetrate.

 

Pete

[Retired Bob]

5 hours ago, PeterB said:

Of course sloping armour does not only deflect shells better but also effectively makes it "thicker" - when a shell travelling horizontally hits a sheet of armour say 5cm thick and angled at 45 degrees to the vertical, it actually has to go through about 6cm to penetrate.

Nice work there, Peter.  This is the reasoning that the historians at Bovington use when describing the angled plates on the hulls of the German armoured cars.  Many decades ago, I built the 1/35 Tamiya kit of the 232 Rad, I painted it up using some photos of vehicles arriving in North Africa, diverted from the Balkan theatre.  As they were painted in panzer grey and the crew didn't have any sand coloured paint they made some bowls of mud and daubed it over the vehicle to camouflage them.  To get the same effect I painted my model in panzer grey and using the thick sludge from an unstirred tin of Humbrol Authentic desert sand colour I daubed it over the kit.  I think I still have it somewhere; I'll dig it out for a photo.

[PeterB]

Well, the wheels lined up fine I am pleased to say so I have loaded up the mudguards with the various stowage boxes, sirens, extinguishers and rearward facing Notek night driving light and glued them on, after first fitting the headlights to both ends - Roden do not provide locating holes just very shallow dents which disappear once painted so I had to drill some though they are slightly out but near enough.

Not quite as orange as the older kits yet - may change once I get a second coat and some varnish on, however I suspect there is an element of weathering/aging involved as well as most of my existing Afrika Korps kits are at least 30 years old, some more like 50! Quite a few more bits and pieces to glue on to the upper hull before I can get it all painted.

 

Not the prettiest of vehicles, certainly when compared with the later 234 - "purposeful" might be a fairer description.

 

Pete

Edited November 7, 2022 by PeterB

[Retired Bob]

13 hours ago, PeterB said:

Not the prettiest of vehicles, certainly when compared with the later 234 - "purposeful" might be a fairer description.

Agreed about the look of them, but they had a useful roof rack.  I have dug out my Tamiya 232 Rad built in the 80s, painted as described earlier.

One of the biggest drawbacks on this old kit was the mesh covers over the exhaust silencers was a solid moulding.  I always intended to get the AFV Club kitto see how that built up, but...

[PeterB]

Bit more work on the upper body.

As with my previous build I had problems with the handrails ( or at least I presume that is what they are) - Roden have got them incorrectly numbered on the instructions I think. They seem to have been standard when built though either removed or broken off later in some pics and you can see that in Bob's pic above he did not have them. What he did have was the 4 small lights? below the turret but they are tiny in this scale and after one pinged off into the unknown I decided not to fit them. The strange "digger bucket" like contraption at the front was called a " zerschillerplatte" apparently and was a sort of angled spaced armour. It seems that by the end of 1940 it was felt that the front armour was vulnerable so this device began to be fitted - perhaps not to all as it is only in some pics and again Bob does not have one on his build. Inevitably the crew used it as extra stowage space.

 

I have now put on the front Notek night driving light and the assembled turret (less the MG 34) so this is how a standard Sd Kfz 231 would have looked other than the pole radio aerial later replaced with a star version on some machines.

Of course, being a 232 (Fu) this one has the "bedstead" type antenna array which Bob aptly calls a "roof rack" and that is why there are a couple of patches of white masking tape over the locating dents on the rear upper hull for some of the support struts. I am not entirely looking forward to fitting that as it looks like it will be a bit of a juggling match to get everything lined up and some of the parts are very small and fragile.

 

A fair bit more complicated than the Fujimi kits I am building but not as difficult as I remembered. Depending on how long the decs take to bleach I should be nicely placed to have nearly finished my entries by the end of the week when the Ju88 GB starts.

 

Pete

Edited November 8, 2022 by PeterB

[Retired Bob]

1 hour ago, PeterB said:

As with my previous build I had problems with the handrails ( or at least I presume that is what they are) - Roden have got them incorrectly numbered on the instructions I think. They seem to have been standard when built though either removed or broken off later in some pics and you can see that in Bob's pic above he did not have them.

I think they were brush guards, to prevent tree branches and bushes knocking off the lights and those semaphore indicators.  Not really a problem in the desert so they weren't fitted to the 232 that I was modelling.  The frontal "spaced armour" was also not present on the vehicle that I was making, though I always thought it made them look better.

 

 

[Bertie McBoatface]

It's coming on strong. I like your various musings, very readable.

[PeterB]

30 minutes ago, Retired Bob said:

I think they were brush guards, to prevent tree branches and bushes knocking off the lights and those semaphore indicators.  Not really a problem in the desert so they weren't fitted to the 232 that I was modelling.  The frontal "spaced armour" was also not present on the vehicle that I was making, though I always thought it made them look better.

 

 

Thanks Bob,

 

I did wonder if they were brush guards - certainly that would explain why they were not on some vehicles. I did wonder what the little sticky up bits were - semaphore indicators sound more appropriate to early war French or better still Russian tanks without a radio fitted as standard! Unless of course they were meant to signal supporting infantry perhaps.

 

Cheers

 

Pete

Edited November 8, 2022 by PeterB

[PeterB]

As expected it was fiddly but I got the bedstead on -perhaps a little more "refined" than the one on the old Matchbox Sd. Kfz 232 (Fu) (6Rad). 

 

Contrary to what was perhaps generally believed when I was a lad, the German success in France was not because they had more and better tanks because they did not really, though they did tend to have better tactics and used them in concentrated units rather than spreading them out in penny packets like the French and British. This was to a large extent due to the fact that virtually all their vehicles had radios which allowed much better control on the move, whereas many French tanks had none. So, as I am building a specialist radio version of the 8 wheeled armoured car perhaps a few words on German radios would be appropriate.

 

AFAIK radio messages could be sent in two formats back in WWII – R/T ie voice and W/T ie morse code which generally had rather better range. The original Pz Kfw 1 had a simple receiver with a 1.4 metre rod aerial and a range of about 4km in W/T and 2km in R/T depending of course on terrain and perhaps weather, whilst the commander's tanks would also have a transmitter. Later tanks would have both transmitter and receiver with a 2 metre rod or maybe a so called “star” aerial with rather more range, but specialist command or radio vehicles had to be provided for long range transmission such as to HQ and supporting artillery, and many of these had a frame or bedstead type of aerial. Recce vehicles such as the one in this kit were sometimes provided with longer range aerials and this Sd Kfz 232 (Fu) had a FuG11 or maybe FuG12 radio set with a full frame aerial giving a range of 50km for W/T and 10km for R/T or say my sources say. Some later vehicles had a large extending mast which had to be winched up to its full 9 metre length and could give ranges of 200/70 km!

 

So,  a little stowage to add perhaps, and then more painting to do and hopefully it will be decal time.

 

Pete

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 8, 2022 by PeterB

[Retired Bob]

5 hours ago, PeterB said:

I did wonder if they were brush guards - certainly that would explain why they were not on some vehicles. I did wonder what the little sticky up bits were - semaphore indicators sound more appropriate to early war French or better still Russian tanks without a radio fitted as standard! Unless of course they were meant to signal supporting infantry perhaps.

I wonder if, seeing as these armoured cars were in service pre-war, that the semaphore indicators were for moving on German roads.  I have seen in some of my books, German tanks with number plates and driver under instruction signs fitted, the book notes that these were just for driving on the German road network and not fitted for combat.

[PeterB]

1 hour ago, Retired Bob said:

I wonder if, seeing as these armoured cars were in service pre-war, that the semaphore indicators were for moving on German roads.  I have seen in some of my books, German tanks with number plates and driver under instruction signs fitted, the book notes that these were just for driving on the German road network and not fitted for combat.

Sounds a bit like the direction indicators on my first car - a Morris Minor 1000. Somebody had fitted an indicator light kit but the old semaphore arms still tried to work at times!😄

 

Pete

Edited November 8, 2022 by PeterB

[PeterB]

Nearly finished, and here is a comparison with the later Sd Kfz 234/2 Puma.

As you can see it has a much lower hull and turret profile but does height matter - well perhaps it does. Depending on the internal layout it may give more internal headroom this improving comfort, it is easier to see over obstacles and you can actually see further if the terrain permits, but the downside is that you can also be seen easier and that can be fatal in the recce role. The Brits were happy with their Daimlers which had a very low profile, as did the German Sd Kfz 222 even with the anti grenade screen fitted - in fact here is a montage.

Not entirely fair as the 232 (8 Rad) is 1/72 whilst the other 3 are supposedly 1/76 but you will get the point - this was a big tall beastie. My Encyclopaedia of German tanks says the heights were 2m for the 222, 2.26m for the 6 Rad 232, 2.28m for the 234 and 2.35m for the 8 Rad 232 compared with 2.26m for the British Daimler, but then the Humber was 2.39m so maybe the 232 8 Rad was not that bad after all.

 

Pete

Edited November 10, 2022 by PeterB

[PeterB]

Well, that did not take too long.

Normally I build planes and they can be quite complicated and slow, but every once in a while I enjoy a bit of small scale armour as a sort of change. Unlike the large scale they can be pretty quick builds - in fact back in the "Anything but Injection "GB I "officially" built 16 Millicast 1/76 AFV as well as finishing off 3 or 4 part complete ones, and refurbished or built a few injection ones too in the background. Not a great deal of skill involved but a lot of fun! Of course being retired and virtually housebound does help, and after that little break I should be in the mood for the "Ju88 Family" GB in a couple of days.

 

If and when the sun comes out I will get some pics for the gallery.

 

Pete