Vision Check

Roden's itty-bitty 1/72nd scale SdKfz-234/1 armored car.  I included my hand mostly to show the small size of the finished model.  There is a staggering quantity of parts in the kit - 153, according to the Internet.  I found it a hard build.  Not because the fit is bad, or the kit is badly engineered.  It's just that it consists of a lot of parts, and many of them are desperately small.

Here is a brief summary of the modeling tools you'll find useful in building this kit:

1.  Tweezers
2.  Binocular magnifiers
3.  Roughly a quart of Old Grand Dad
4.  A CD of soothing music

The suspension is particularly alarming, mostly because the wheels appear to want to float on just the central half-axles, and there's no solid connection between the upper and lower control arms and the wheel backing plate.  I attached my wheels with copious quantities of super glue and managed to get them half-assed aligned, but for a while, despair was on the menu and I didn't think I'd ever get them on.

I painted it with Model Master acrylic panzer yellow, but it looks awfully green on the finished model, at least to my eye.  The same paint looks okay on 1/35th scale models, so I think it must be a scale effect.  Next time, I'll lighten it with radome tan or something along those lines.

And there will be a next time, because I also happen to have a Roden 1/72nd scale SdKfz-234/4 "PAKwagen" in my stash.  But I don't think I'll start on it any time soon.  At least not until my eyes uncross and I replenish my supply of whiskey.