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Post by El Caracho on Jan 13, 2018 11:14:38 GMT
Here's my Cobi rendition of a late production Sturmpanzer IV "Brummbär".   This tank was on my list of MOCs to build for a long time, but I didn't want to start until I figured out how to build the short gun barrel. One of the "Battle of Berlin" magazine dioramas included a barrel I found suitable for this purpose in the color light grey, but I didn't want to build another Panzer IV based tank in light grey. So I had to wait until such a barrel part showed up in tan, brown or green. My preferred color would have been tan or brown, so I could build the Brummbär in the same color scheme as the Brummbär on display at the "Deutsches Panzermuseum". But the first barrels in a suitable color other than light grey came from the new T-34/SU-85 sets, so they were green, so I choose to start the project in a tan/green color scheme.  I took some reference pictures of the real Brummbär on display at the "Deutsches Panzermuseum", and then I started to see if I can capture that characteristic look of the upper hull frontal armor plate and gun barrel with Cobi bricks. Only after I was satisfied with the result of that selected section, the whole building project got a "GO".  For the rear hatch of the upper hull I made a custom sticker for the slope brick:  |
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Post by El Caracho on Jan 13, 2018 11:16:17 GMT
The side panel armor was 5 studs high, and there are (still) no 2x2 and 3x3 wing tiles that, when combined, form a continuously angled edge. But this time I opted against the combination of wing tiles and slope bricks, thus accepting a little gap between the frontal armor panel and the side armor panels.    But a slightly tilted 5-stud-high side panel does not match a height in plates, causing a gap of half a plate height between the side panel and the roof (or hull), which I did not find acceptable. So I had to come up with a solution to mount the roof and back wall of the upper hull structure with a height distance of half a plate height. Well ... you can see on the detail pictures how I did it, which was not the easiest solution to come up with.       For the roof the new 2x4 slope bricks came in pretty handy:  Notable may also be the building technique used for the machine gun mount in the top right corner of the frontal armor plate. Again, look at the detail pictures to see that this could not have been done without the ingenious "single stud on demand" part to mount the slope bricks. And this "gun barrel hinge" is also a pretty usable part to mount things at a certain angle.       Other than that, the rest of the build was pretty straightforward :-)  As usual: All the pictures can also be found in my flickr album for this MOC or in the COBI Small Army WWII Brick Sets user group. |
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Post by El Caracho on Jan 13, 2018 11:25:24 GMT
A very fine build indeed, Caracho! How all those top hull plates conect is pretty impressive. It all connects smoothly.... How you placed those side hull plates is great, i couldn't really get that half a plate placement, but it looks awesome! Frontal machinegun build is fantastic. I really like your custom made stickers in true cobi style. This model fits perfectly with your other panzer iv build models. The only thing i can comment is the back right side engine ruster, i would place them 1 stud upwards, left and right rusters are not placed at the same place. Besides that, greatly done as allways. Only one sidenote; because of it's massive frontal structure, you can really see the overdone width because of those 3 stud tracks. The original cobi jagdpanther had that same look. If oneday cobi makes the perfect panzer iv undercarriage i would really narrowed down all your great models by 2 studs in width. But besides that, a real fantastic(and complicated) smooth and slick model. You're the Man! |
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