May Update

Been busy this month with our Big Yellow Truck getting it successfully through an MOT, giving it a spring clean in the back and doing some cleaning and painting of the chassis, With that and a weekend away there hasnt been much time for progress on the Big Panther. While I've been sidetracked however, Howard's been busy! Whats better than one Big Panther?

Yup, you guessed it, two Big Panthers!! Here's the second chassis behind my tank at the Uckfield Panzerwerks. I arrived Saturday morning with my tank to carry on working on it and found the almost completed second chassis :-)

Some close ups of the second chassis and one of the rear idler adjusters. All this needs painting which is something we hope to do soon and get it put together.

Meanwhile...we modified the bottom of the turret a little as it was rubbing on parts of the hull while traversing.

Well when I say we... :-)

The rest of the day was spent removing the moulded running boards and sanding off the moulded tool racks and details. Because the cutouts for the sponsons were wrong on the glacis, we cut back the glacis and trimmed the sides back. Not easy to explain but it makes the whole thing look that much better! Not seen in this shot but the brackets to support the front mudguards have been fitted as well.

 Here Howard's making up the new running boards. Because they are nearly three feet long, Howards folder cant fold it all in one piece so they're made in three pieces Tig welded together. Then of course we realised that we needed to make the support brackets! I was dreading this as they are a complicated thing (typical German!)

 This was the Mk1 version, made flat and the folded on a jig...

 ...to this. Nearly right but not quite! So after two other attempts...

 ...we came up with this, the Mk4 version!

This is just one of twelve (groan!). They'll need a little tidying up and the sloping fold on the far right is not prototypical, the real ones were welded but we cant weld to a fibre glass top so ours will be bolted on but thats about it!

Next weekend is the first show of the season and work will soon start painting and assembling the second chassis so work will probably slow down a bit on the first model. We shall see.