May 18, 2018

Plastic Soldier Company
15mm Marder III
And Bitsrecycling With
The 3D Printer

Yesterday I built another Marder III kit from the Plastic Soldier Company. It is a nice little tank and it's built went without any problems. There were neither sinkholes nor flash on the sprue. It will get the same paintjob than the one I already painted.

From this kit you can build three different tanks: the Panzerkampfwagen 38(t), the Sd.Kfz. 139 and the Marder III, which I built. When I was finished with the constuction of the left tank on the first picture some months ago, there was a massive amount of bits left in the sprue just as today.
Take a look at the picture below:

Not only that there are 8 crewmen included, there was a full 38(t) turret and a complete Sd.Kfz. 139 upper structure left in the sprue.
This would be a lot of plastic that would vanish in the bitsbox, maybe I could use the 38(t) turret to build a bunker, they were used to guard borders and other structures. But this means there is still the complete upper half of a tank, which may be used.

Days later I had an idea. I turned on the 3D printer and printed a Panzer 38(t) hull from this great collection. Then I tried to build a Sd.Kfz.139 from the structure of the PSC kit and the selfprinted hull. With some sanding, some putty and a lot of superglue I made it. I had to replace the mg barrel but the only things I had to build from scratch were the exhaust and the storage box on the back.

While we are running low on filament, today I did not print a hull for the actual structure I have left, but I did this two times before. When I will do the modification to a third tank, I will make a post about the built.

Both lower parts of these tanks were printed. While it looks a little crude on close sight, these tanks will be decent gaming pieces. They will be used as custom units for TANKS, I made first tries on creating new units for the game from this template.
But before this will be done there are a lot of things to finish before.

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