Tamiya Panther G, Cuckoo 4th Battalion Coldstream Guards, British Army, Netherlands 1944/5 1:48 – build

Feature Article with Calum Gibson

…and here’s a look at how it all turned out…

Depicted as “Cuckoo”, a vehicle captured by the 4th Battalion Coldstream Guards operating in the Netherlands in 1944/45. This is quite a famous vehicle and there was some wartime footage of it in action on YouTube.

This kit was built as an entry for the 2024 NSW Scale Model Show’s Panzer Tracks Trophy. The theme being “In Enemy Hands”.

The kit is the Tamiya Kit No 32520, 1:48 German Panther Type G. The vehicle I wanted to depict has Zimmerit which is only available from Monroe Perdu Studios.

The Build

Like all these Tamiya 48 scale armour kits, assembly is pretty straightforward. But you always seem to have to do the lower hull first so I started with the wheels.

I made a couple of masks on my Silhouette Portrait from 10 thou card. I painted the black rubber wheels then used the masks to paint each wheel the colour. I’m not sure why I thought I should paint the inner wheels dark yellow considering all wheels are green, clearly I wasn’t thinking.

I decided to assemble the tracks into a length and then once set I’d fit them over the wheels softening the joints as required with liquid glue and forming them over the wheels to get a complete assembly. This seemed like a good idea at the time but proved more trouble than it was worth.

The tracks are base coated with a 50/50 mix of Tamiya German Grey and Red Brown.

For weathering tracks I just can’t get past pigments. I have watched a heap of YouTube videos with different methods but I always come back to pigments. Tracks go in dirt and pigments are just dirt.

I have used Mike Rinaldi’s methods in the past and they work for me so I just did the same again. Three mixes of pigments, light, mid and dark. Each mix has multiple different pigments in it. These are applied with various old brushes and set with X-20A.

Darker marks are splatters of Mr Weathering Color Stain brown flicked from a brush of and old airbrush needle.

Read on…