More 15mm WW2 Armour - Panzer IV-H and Tiger 1E

Group photo - from left, Tiger 1E, Pazner IV-H, Panzer III-M

Continuing with the 15mm WW2 armoured round-up, here are another couple of models I finished while on vacation - a Panzer IV-H and a Tiger 1E, both from Battlefront.  First up some pictures of the Mark IV, followed by a brief snapping of crayons.

As I ranted over at Analogue Hobbies, the experience assembling the schurzen plates for the Battlefront Mark IV is absolutely awful.  Now I see why there are so many Battlefront Panzer IVs on gaming tables without any schurzen.

The schurzen skirts are hanging on by a thread...

You can see in this photo I had trouble with the tactical number...just couldn't get the decal to sit right...

The schurzen set comes in plastic. The quality of the plastic is just terrible - very hard, but incredibly brittle.  You need to put eight little brackets together, four for each side of the panzer hull, and EACH ONE broke when I made the cut on the sprue, because the plastic is just terrible. TERRIBLE. And this also assumes that Battlefront has sculpted the proper number of spaces on each side of the Mark IV hull to even mount the brackets (assuming they come off in one piece). This compares to the metal schurzen of the late model Mark III, which work PERFECTLY. 

To "mount" these schurzen plates, I just tried to find enough surface area on the sides of the tank and prayed to the superglue gods.  The plates stuck, for now, and while it's a bit silly in that there is zero separation between the plate and the side of the vehicle, it doesn't look too bad.  We'll see how long it lasts. I want to add more Mark IVs to my 15mm armoured lineup (after all, the tank was a late-war workhorse), but I'm looking into other options, or even tracking down some of the "old" metal schurzen sets for use with future models.

OK - on to the Tiger.  This model had a big-time casting flaw in the turret base - not visible while the turret is on, but was such that the turret had to be glued in place.  I know a lot of gamers out there do this already, for a number of sensible reasons, but the eternal kid in me likes having the turrets on my 15mm tanks move for some reason - so this was a disappointment.

A classic beast - had always wanted to paint one of these in 15mm.

I have now nearly completed the German side for that scenario from "Conflict Of Heroes" (mentioned in this post)- I just need to do up a recovery half-track.  It just arrived in the mail (thank you, Sentry Box!) so I hope to finish that very soon.  Stay tuned for that, and the Soviet side of the scenario! And also coming soon, a change of gears back to Rogue Trader, as the Crimson First "beakies" start to move through the paint shop...