A hefty boi (Patreon)

My friends, I started working on the turret yesterday. Keeping things relaxed as I'm also working on that little surprise I promised you earlier :)

All the weld lines are rescribed with a chisel, the flame cuts are finished according to the real Maus turret (I used a needle file, a hobby blade, and a Tamiya scriber). I actually went back and looked at some SBS photos of my old Maus for inspiration :) I used a large AC drill on low RPM to drill out the "pegs" that hold the steel plates together. The pegs are 2mm in diameter, punched from 0.5mm sheet.

Well, to be more precise: the real Maus in Kubinka has most of the flame cuts machined smooth. But that's not fun! And I suppose if these tanks were mass-produced during the late stages of the war, there wouldn't be time to do that either.

The plastic mantlet from the kit is good. Much better than the abomination that was in all the old Dragon kits. But the resin replacement from Paper Panzer Productions is just much nicer in every way :) It just didn't fit the kit's gun cradle, so I had to make an improvised solution using a length of sprue and a bit of superglue.

The kit also comes with some 3D printed parts. A commander's cupola and what seems to be an anti-aircraft defense system mounted on the turret. But I'm not sure if I'll use them. The cupola is IMO a piece of crap because you can't open the hatch. Also, I'd like to preserve the OG shapes of the Maus turret. And I want to mount IR vision device(s) in the hatch(es).

So I guess I'll just proceed with welding now :)