You may know the story – you pick up the model and think this might be nice out of the box model. You start building it just to realize that hmm, this detail is not that great and needs some extra work, the barrel is not as clean as you would want it, etc. etc. and suddenly you find out that the simple out of the box project has evolved into something more complicated.

Well this is exactly the case of this project. After having built the kit easily and quickly out of the box I felt something is missing. I have discovered aftermarket parts for the kit produced by company SBS models that I felt add quite a bit of detail to the model. First there was the tool set. There are no tools in the Hobby Boss kit, which seems strange, so in case you want to have any tools on the model, aftermarket set is your only solution (unless of course you go scratch-building). The set is not that complicated there are five tools with clamps provided in combination of resin and photoetch parts. Four of the tolls are the usual ones you can see on the other tanks of the era, the last one is quite strange looking tool, that you can see on the pictures mounted on the left side of the tank. I assume this is some kind of track tensioning tool, but I could be wrong.

The assembly is bit fiddly, the photoetch parts are quite tiny, but if you have handled something like German tool clamps in photoetch before, you can manage.

The second addition was the barrel, which has some excellent tiny details on the muzzle brake and is definitely improvement over the plastic one, which is not bad, but still only as good as a plastic one can be.

The only piece now left are Friul tracks. At the end I got myself a set of these as after having tried to put together few plastic tracks i figured out it is going to be much less painful and much faster to work with metal tracks. I have tried to put together few track links from the Friul tracks and can say that this is really the case.

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