Cyber Hobby Sdkfz 251/23 Ausf D (2007)

[Bill Plunk]

Build Log for Cyber Hobby kit #6293 Sdkfz 251/23 ausf D Reconnaisance Vehicle as an OOB project.

[Bill Plunk]

It's been a while since I worked on a DML/CH 251 halftrack build, in fact the last one was the /21 Drilling well over a year ago so figured it was time to revisit the series with the "final" variant in the form of the /23. I say "final" as this vehicle never actually entered production and as such is a "paper panzer" type of project, meaning I can have fun with it in the finish department as the mood strikes when I get there.

First up in Step 1 are the standard 251 assembly process for the lower hull tub. PE strips are provided for either side to represent the added on armor plates around the running gear although these don't line up perfectly with the cutout/mount points for the bump stumps if you align them up properly with the ends of the hull, it's not a show stopper in later steps. This step also calls for the installation of the internal details such as the transmission, the fuel tank, battery, etc. but since these details aren't visible and can cause interference with the floor plate mounting if not precisely installed, I left them off. The step also calls for the assembly of the D19-D21-D22 combo parts for the rearmost suspension element but previous experience has shown it's best to wait until mounting the suspension arms to insure correct placement in the next step to avoid unnecessary complications.



Step 2 deals with the installation of the 12 suspension arms along with the armored housing for the front suspension/engine bay. Care has to be taken when mounting the arms in their stations as there's just a little bit of play possible between the mount hole and the external alignment post and to get all the arms straight in unison requires a little bit of careful tweaking adjustments once they are all in place.



Steps 3 and 4 deal with the installation of the front axle and suspension along with the construction/installation of all the interleaved roadwheels. The front suspension is a tricky assembly and the little call-out box for the combination of the springs and wheel axle mounts can be a bit confusing at first glance. Parts C20 and C25 clamp together to capture the post arms and allow the independent wheels mounts to swivel as workably suspension but only if you are careful with the glue. When done right along with just snap fitting the rocker bar C15 in place, the front suspension becomes "steerable" so that the tires mirror each other depending on the desired adjustable pose. On top of that if parts C10 and C11 are also installed properly, the suspension can become fully workable laterally as well, which is a good thing and not something the instructions directly call out as an option. It will save heartache down the road though to insure that the front wheels don't "float" once the tracks are put in place.

I cleaned up all the road wheels and secured them in place temporarily with blue tack for now. All of the wheels had multiple sprue points, some as many as 6, so care has to be taken here as well not to damage the narrow rubber rims in the process.



Quite a lot of interior is provided with this one so I'm considering leaving the rear doors open in order to show off some of that in connection with the closed top hull.

[Bill Plunk]

Due to the wonderful nature of the calendar and Easter/Holy Week, I had the day off today (and Monday as well) so set to work on this one with a vengeance.

Step 5 begins work on the interior with the hull floor and driver area. I've decided to finish the interior with Red Oxide on the floor and Interior Buff for the hull sides and roof since it's an enclosed or mostly enclosed interior. To facilitate this, some things were left off in various steps to allow for ease of detail painting later on. In this step, the first thing to note is that there are 2 holes in the floor that need to be opened up in order to correctly mount the radio operator's toolbox/seat base. The instructions never tell you to do this but it's fairly easy to figure out after looking at the base part B22 and the two large posts that need holes to go into position properly.



I constructed the base and seat frame and installed them along with the little details for the driver's area but left the seats off along with all the gear shifts and moved on to Step 6, which deals primarily with the instrument panel. Most of the parts were installed as directed with the exception of the steering wheel and gas mask canister. The instructions are a little tricky here, they show part A44 already installed and it's called out only vaguely and I overlooked this along with part A2 until later on and corrected the error at that time (after painting!). Test fit with blue tack on the seats and instrument panel showed everything matched up well with the floor and the floor to the chassis, however I didn't complete the step as directed and install it just yet due to the warning I received about hull fit and alignment with the top.





Step 7 deals with the details for the hull sides. The left side has the greater amount of detail and work required. There are many molded on locator marks which makes it confusing as only about 1/3 are actually for use with the others needing to be removed. The instructions include a side-bar diagram showing the full layout of the left side panel but this is very misleading particularly in regards to the position of the 2.0cm ammo rack. The ammo rack needs to be flush or slightly lower in relation to the top of the hull side, not raised as the diagram seems to indicate. The correct placement is shown in Step 10 and a test fit with it in the implied raised position does create an imbalance in fit with the hull top, but this is easily eliminated by sliding the rack down to the proper slightly lowered position. One nice feature in the kit is PE inserts that allow for displaying up to 4 of the ammo rack slots empty with additional ammo cartridges to fill some or all of the gaps if desired. The step adds a little more to the confusion in that it directs you to build 2 of the ammo racks but there's space (and PE inserts) provided for only 1, so the other is an extra.



The radio mount on the same side is another tricky assembly. The detail provided in styrene is amazing, with the rack actually being a true rack as opposed to a solid frame as common in other kits. The radio mount needs to be cantilevered out from the hull side since the hull side sits at an angle and the radios need to be vertically straight for use by the radio operator. The placement of the foot mounts to achieve this is again vague in the instructions and rather than glue them to the hull and then mount the rack as indicated, I mounted them directly to the rack and then used the hull roof to determine the right placement to allow it to fit properly. The base mounts for additional electrical/radio gear were also installed and a rather large sink mark that would be visible with the rear doors open was puttied in as well.





The right hull side was much simpler to deal with. The only modification required was to remove the mount posts for the unused seat back cushion on part B26 and sand it down. It also had a large sink mark that needed putty treatment.



Step 8, which calls for the lower hull panels to be joined to the chassis/floor was skipped since I want to paint all of this first and then assemble along with the roof.

Step 9 calls for the construction of the front hull plate with the armored visors. For some reason unknown to me, Dragon insists on molding all of the parts for these in clear plastic instead of just the armored glass blocks since those are the only ones that need to be clear. It makes it harder to assemble the visors, especially for the mount pins on the hinge arms, since you cant' see very well where exactly they are supposed to go. I managed to construct both of them after some effort and decided to pose the driver's visor in the open position with the glass block in place. The radio operator's visor was left in the closed position since there's no radio there and no crewman needing to see. These will be protected with blue tack during the painting process in order to preserve them for the full effect.





This step also calls for the construction of the rear hull plate and the rear doors in either the open or closed position. Since I'm going to leave them open, I installed the hinge locks and handles in the "open" position and left them loose to ease painting and detailing later on.



Finally, Step 10 was completed with the installation of the side visor blocks and the spare windshield wiper visors for both view ports. I also installed the "map rack" using the PE item supplied in the kit instead of the styrene part since the PE part actually, after some very careful bending, represents a true rack vs. the solid styrene part. I did not install the radio and rack as indicated as that's a standard item on regular 251s but not for this one since the radios are located in the back and only one antenna provided, so it was left off on purpose.



I also cheated a bit and skipped ahead to Step 13 and installed the roof plate over the driver's seat and filled in the hole for the MG mount there and on the rear hull above the rear doors as well since no external MGs will be mounted on this variant. Everything was then hauled out to the garage for some time with the AB and I'll post pics of that later once I've completed the detailing.

[Bill Plunk]

Today's efforts were all about the details for the interior and there was quite a bit to take care of in the process. I bounced around among the different sections to allow things to dry and eventually got them all taken care of. The 2.0cm cartridges contain the first rounds in the magazine molded in, so I did my best to bring those out by using a litle bit of Brass paint and a fine 000 brush along with some drybrushed Steel for the cartridges themselves. I also detailed and added in the MG42 ammo drums, the MP40s, and the electrical and radio junction boxes, using thin gauge solder for the wiring and an old PE/styrene headset from the spares bin. To give a hint of light wear, I also drybrushed some Raw Umber over the Interior Buff in various places. The missing seat back cushions were also installed. Last but not least some Silver was used in the spare armored glass blocks to give the appearance of glass for those.





I also detailed the head-bump pads on the roof and added some details to the armored visor housings, painting the swivel handles with Aircraft Interior Black where appropriate.



The floor also got some attention with the seat cushion installed, the two crew seats for the driver's area along with their PE springs, one of which came out slightly worse for wear in the removal from the fret process. These are very fragile and have cross tension points on the fret as you can see in the example on the right, it's easy to get them a little bent out of shape if not careful. The floor was very lightly drybrushed with Steel followed up with Raw Umber to give it some variation and slightly worn appearance. The kit supplied decals were used for the instrument panel faces along with a touch of Solvaset to get them to set in nice and tight.



The rear hull panel and doors also got some attention, the latch hinge springs were picked out and the two fire extinguishers installed. I kept their clasps and holders in Interior Buff and the FE's themselves in Dunkelgelb since it stands to reason they would be standard issue items and therfore be the same as the exterior color vs. the interior. Plus it adds a touch of additional color variation to the interior to boot. Since the lower threshold is flush with the floor of the compartment, I painted that to match the Red Oxide but left the rest in Interior Buff for when the doors are opened and pre-weathered them a bit with some Raw Umber as well.



Then came the moment of truth...bringing it all together! I at first was going to attach the hull sides to the roof and then secure it all to the floor but that's not possible due to the clearance needed for the instrument panel on the interior. Instead, I opted for a compromise and secured the left side since it had more of the detail to the roof first, insuring a good fit, then glued it as an "L" shaped arrangement to the floor. This just left the right hull side to slip into position to complete the hull arrangement. The side hull panels fit very tightly against the floor, requiring some adjustments to get them to sit all the way down like they should but I didn't have any fit problems with the sides and roof at all doing it this way. I used a couple of rubber bands to help out and keep everything tightly together since the hull sides at the top kept wanting to slide every so slightly out of position while the glue set.



I tried to get some shots of the interior once it had all finished up but it's too cavernous from a lighting perspective and the best I could do was provide a close-up of the radios in their new home.



Next up will be the fenders and exterior fittings as well as the 2.0cm gun and turret.

[Bill Plunk]

Work continued today beginning with Step 11 and the leftover steps that weren't completed yesterday. The rear hull details were added in the form of the towing pintle and fuel cap. I also installed the nose armor plate and the engine access hatch on the hood to round out the missing elements. The nose plate required some sanding adjustment to get it just right, but not too much hassle in the end.





Step 12 calls for the assembly of the side hull sponsons and storage boxes. The option, as in other 251 kits, is present to leave the right forward-most or left rear-most storage box open, but I elected to close them both up. I used the supplied brass width indicators, bending them to shape using the nifty little jig provided on the back of Sprue C and installed them along with the muffler/exhaust and Bosch light. Both sponsons were then installed in Step 13 and it was a fairly good fit except for the cheek bulges just forward of the cab, these required a little bit of putty work to fill the gaps that I couldn't quite close up using normal means. The rear antenna mount was also installed in this step. Step 13 also directs the construction and installation of the tracks but I'll be dealing with that later on and skipped it for the time being.





Step 14 began work on the main armament with the construction of the base mount and details. Some nice PE details for the sights are provided or would be provided under normal circumstances I guess, something must have happened to my PE set in the manufacturing process since the ring sight was just that, a nice ring, with no cross-hairs present. Fortunately the normal 251 fret includes a ring sight normally used on the MG34 so I modified it to fill in. This step also gives you 3 different options for constructing the 2.0cm armament...one option is just use the provided Flak 38 barrel, second option is to perform surgery on the styrene barrel, substituting an aluminum barrel body replacement and fit a styrene suppressor, and the third option is to perform surgery on the styrene barrel and replace it wholesale with a brass KwK 38 barrel. I chose the third option simply because the brass barrel has some gorgeous detail, particularly on the flash suppressor, that the other options just couldn't compare to. Included on the sprue J is a very nice jig to assist with assembling everything to get it lined up properly and while it's designed to assist with the styrene-aluminum-styrene option, it worked just fine as an aid for the brass barrel too. The step also includes an option for either PE or styrene for the shell ejector plate but since this will be covered by the spent shell chute, I used the styrene item.





Step 15 completes the construction of the gun mount and assembly into the base of the turret. This Step has a couple of head-scratchers though to watch out for. The first is a mysterious call-out for part H7 to be used as the magazine on the gun, however this was already taken care of in Step 14 with the installation of K36. To add insult to injury, part H7 can't fit into the gun properly as designed so why it's indicated here is mystery #1. The second head-scratcher involves part H5, the spent shell chute. It's clearly installed in the first part of the step but in the second part that shows the whole mount being installed into the turret base, it's gone! Mystery #2! As a side note, the kit provides a spent shell box for the MG34/42 side mount but there's not catch bag or box for the 2.0cm under the chute...not sure if there was one or what design it would have...photos of the interior on a 222 turret show a canvas bag but I don't know if that carried over to this type of turret or not. I'll have to think about that and see if it's worth trying to scratch a representation or just leave it out. I also chose the PE option for the small gun shield and this was tricky to get folded into the correct shape as it's thicker than usual PE and no fold/bend lines are indicated, so a bit of trial and error was necessary before finally getting it right. For now, the KwK 38 is only dryfit in place and can be slid out to allow for painting/detailing.



Step 16 completes the installation into the turret base. The gun mount can freely elevate although just a bit of trimming at the front of the turret ring was necessary to allow the brass splinter shield to have the proper clearance. The gun can elevate nearly vertical, making it easy to slide the gun barrel back out of the cradle, something I tested before gluing everything in place just to be sure I wasn't putting myself in a corner. It was only after looking at this photo that I realized that another part is missing that is not called out in the instructions...part J5 needs to be installed to the rear of the recoil housing but this is not indicated anywhere in the instructions...however it shows as installed as part of the subsquent diagrams and I didn't catch it. Good thing about taking in progress photos!



Step 17 adds the details for the crew seats and mounts. This includes another radio and power/intercom box and I'm at a loss to figure out how that would be wired up...so for now I'm going to leave it be. I might just give it a set of headphones like in the rear and just leave them on the seat or something like that...the interior is pretty crowded, not much room to hang something like that.



Step 18 deals with the external turret details and the grenade screens. The grenade screens were a challenge to get bent into the proper shape as their design meant I had to bend them by hand as I couldn't get clearance on the surfaces without risking bending the other at the same time in my Fender Bender. Several back and forth attempts with various flat nosed and needle nosed pliers did the trick and I soldered their front join to insure a good, permanent, bond. I opted for the "open" position in order to show off the interior and they were installed on their hinge arms without problems. I believe the screens actually had a wider angle vs. straight up 90 degrees as the kit has them, but I went with it anyway. The turret top and base are dryfit only to allow for easier painting on the interior and will be joined up later on.



Last up in Step 19 was the installation of the rear radio antenna, however I chose to leave off the provided "star" as it's way out of scale vs. the antenna aerial and just looked odd to me. A test fit of the turret base into the hull roof shows that the fit is extremely tight...and that's probably not a bad thing as there aren't any sort of retaining lugs to keep the turret in place. A quick test revealed that the gun crew seats don't have enough clearance on the inside with either the ammo rack or the side storage bin to rotate anyhow...guess that's a by-product of having to guess about the interior layout by the kit designers in one regard if nothing else.



Tomorrow will see the first efforts at painting weather permitting.

[Bill Plunk]

As a culmination to this Easter weekend activity, the weather cooperated beautifully although it was a bit windy at times. Before painting, some prep work was necessary, the turret ring was masked off to protect the interior, the rear doors were secured in place for the same purpose, all of the road wheels were mounted on toothpicks with blue tack, and the suspension arms were also covered in blue tack to protect them for later gluing.

I decided to do something a little bit different this time around and instead of priming with Flat Black, I used Italian Dark Brown. I'd used this on the Char B1 build and liked the results and it has the added bonus of not requiring two coats of paint (Flat Black and Rust) to achieve basically the same base color. Over this I laid down a lightened coat of Dunkelgelb in the form of an 80/20 mix of Dunkelgelb and Light Gray. I still needed to use Flat black for all the rubber rims, but that was easily taken care of at the start so they could dry in time to get their turn with the Dark Brown and Dunkelgelb base coats. I'm not going to apply a camo scheme to this one since they never were used in combat and will go for a straight Dunkelgelb finish and standard markings.



With that taken care of, I turned my attention to the remaining details in the turret. The KwK 38 was painted with Metalizer Gunmetal and dry brushed with Steel and secured finally to its mount base. The kit provides the option to install a coaxial MG34 or MG42 and I opted for the MG42 since this would have been a late war vehicle. The MG42 is a Gen2 item and is very nicely detailed but was lacking an ammo drum. I looked back through the rest of the kit parts and found 2 in the standard parts set but marked as "not to be used"...but that holds true now for only 1 of them. The drum had to be modified slightly in terms of trimming down the mount tab for it to fit properly into the receiver slot and it received the same Gunmetal/Steel treatment. The stock was painted with a 50/50 mix of Military Brown and Leather for its finish.

I added some additional details in the form of painting the elevation/rotation hand wheel with Aircraft Interior Black, drilling out the eyepiece and end on the gunner's sighting scope and painting a dot of silver to simulate the optic lens, and also (not shown) painting the radio and power transformer box between the seats. I'm still thinking about adding another headset but not sold on the idea just yet.

Earlier I'd mentioned that there wasn't a spent shell holder for the KwK 38, turns out it's there but directly under the gun mount. Didn't realize it at first until I elevated the gun all the way vertical and saw how it all came together.



I still haven't secured all the road wheels and started in on the tracks, so plenty of work remains on this yet to be done.

[Bill Plunk]

Just a short update today. Managed to get the road wheels all done and in place. As part of yesterday's efforts, the rubber rims had been sprayed with Flat Black and a circle template used to paint the wheels first with the Italian Dark Brown and then the lightened Dunkelgelb. Only the outward facing wheel surfaces were sprayed with the Dunkelgelb, the others were left in the dark brown deliberately. The assembly of the wheels is a bit tricky since they are of the interleaved design with the outermost wheels being the most sensitive since they use a slot arrangement and a very short hub to attach to the innermost paired wheels. I positioned the inner wheels so that the slot faced upwards to provide the most strength on the under load-bearing point and this helped keep the wheels stable as they set. The guide teeth on the sprockets were hand painted with a spotter brush and are only dry fit for now to aid in the track mounting which is still to come. I'm planning on using the "Magic" track late pattern style provided but each link has 2 ejector marks on each face that will need to be dealt with so some time in front of the TV with a sharp knife and sanding twig will be in order for the coming days.

[Bill Plunk]

The last remaining hurdle to clear were the tracks, so today's efforts focused on them for the most part. I chose the simpler late pattern style provided as "Magic" tracks as opposed to the earlier "skeletal" type that also came in the kit on the standard sprues. Earlier in the week I'd cleaned up each link, removing the two ejector marks on each one. These were raised so it wasn't much effort, just had to be done for all 100+ links provided.

The design of the links allows, if care is exercised, for the links to be workable once constructed. The pins of each link are a tight friction/snap fit into the next link and then the track pad serves as a cap block to "trap" the pins in place. If glue is only applied to the block, the pins can still rotate freely, keeping the links workable. It's not easy and takes some time, but in the end I think the effort was worth it. I spent about 5 hours in the assembly, comparable to the time that a set of MK workable links might take, so I didn't consider it to be overly time consuming from that perspective.





I assembled the links together in pairs first, following the kit instructions of 54 links per side, so 54 pairs were constructed, 27 per track side. Once that was done, I started joining the pairs, so that the runs of 2 became sets of 4...then joining the sets of 4 into lengths of 8...etc. until I had 2 continuous runs of 27 pairs. This allowed sufficient time for the blocks to set up for the most part, although there were a few instances where links separated in the process and had to be rejoined, but in the end, the runs were quite durable.



Since the runs aren't that large and have lots of crevices, I decided to hand paint the MM Non-buffing Metalizer Gunmetal instead of using the AB. Throughout that process I had to test and flex the links to keep them from stiffening up due to the paint but that was only a minor additional factor to pay attention to. The runs were then dry brushed with Steel and then given a wash of Rust followed by a wash of Burnt Umber. Since the track pads are rubber, these were painted last using enamel Gunmetal paint since it's got a nice gray-black tone to it that contrasts to the metal surface of the tracks IMHO.



While all of that was going on there were periods where things needed to set up, so I filled that time by attending to some of the other details such as the axe and pick for the front fenders, painting the tips of the width indicators with Light Gray, and painting and weathering the exhaust/muffler.

When I'd constructed the first run of tracks at 54 links, I tested it on the left side to see how well it would fit and it worked well, so I assumed the same would be true on the right side also. For some reason, and I suspect the suspension arms alignment in relation to the idler wheel more than anything else, the right side needed an extra link to join the two ends together and still is a little more taut than the left side...however when I added 2 extra links, there was too much slack, so it's got a slightly different character to it vs. the left side in terms of how it lays on the road wheels. I don't consider this a flaw necessarily, just odd that the different sides ended up just that, slightly different.

I also secured the turret top and bottom together and installed the open rear hull doors, so everything is now ready to receive its gloss coat tomorrow prior to the decals going on and the weathering process beginning.

[Bill Plunk]

Continuing on from yesterday's efforts, today focused around the markings and initial weathering stages. The vehicle was given an overall coat of Future and allowed to sit for several hours for it to cure up. The decal markings for this vehicle aren't very complex, just 3 balkenkreuze and the front and rear license plates. The decals provided in the kit are a "number jungle" sheet for the license plates and set of several different types of balkenkreuze from Cartograf. Only one style really applies in this case, the somewhat squarish black cross with a white outline, so these were chosen and the others left as spares.

The license plates required the most time because they have to be constructed from the ground up using decals for the white backing and individual additional decals for the WH and serial numbers. The markings page in the instructions call for a 7 digit number and you can literally make up any number you want. If you look closely, you'll see why I chose the numbers I did for the plate to make up the 7 digit serial number. It was a tighter fit to get 7 digits on the rear plates vs. the front, but a little patience and care made it still possible. All of the decals were treated with Walther's Solvaset, particularly since I was laying decals over other decals. For the rear doors, I cut the third balkenkreuze in half and applied the two separately, one to each door, taking care to align the black edge neatly with the door edge to simulate how it would look if closed as a single joined marking.







Another coat of Future was sprayed over the decals once they'd thoroughly dried and the vehicle was again allowed to sit for several hours before returning to work on it. I started the weathering process by using the "dot" method to apply filters/washes of first Raw Sienna, followed by Dunkelgelb 90/10 with Light Gray, and finished off with Raw Umber. A pin wash and further adjustments/washes may be applied, will have to let it sit for a bit and think about the best approach before committing to the final plan of attack.

[Bill Plunk]

A small update today. Had a couple of hours this evening so I applied a pin wash of Burnt Umber to the various raised details and what few panel lines there are on this one. I used a fine point brush to apply the wash and then came back and touched it up with a clean brush dampened with thinner where needed. There are still a couple of areas with some "tide" marks that need to be fine tuned just a bit as the photos reveal, but that's a fairly simple thing to do.





Next up will be a coat of Dullcoat then some pigment treatment to the tracks and undersides, then almost done!