Manda (Amachan) goes to the Eastern Front

A couple of updates.
A small correction from earlier on in the project. I said I was making 3 Panzer III Ausf. J and 1 Ausf. L, I got it wrong they are all Panzer III Ausf. L, the command one is just the uparmoured variant. The Panzer Ausf. J actually has a shorter gun and all of these were planned to be with the longer 5cm gun.
For the change to Battlegroup, until I actually have the rules and can make new army lists, I am still going to roughly follow my Flames of War armylists that I made before.

On to building some tanks.
I wanted to go over the way I apply the magnets to magnetize the turrets onto the tanks. A couple of steps I do just make it a lot easier for me.
In these Panzer III kits the top of the hull does have a hole where you mount the magnet, but the turret bottom does not. By adding a hole to it it makes it easier for air and excess glue to get out so you’re not pushing against that too.

I then put a bit of thin superglue on top of the magnet and force it in it’s hole and the magnets sit completely flush in the hole they are supposed to be in. For the top I can easily just press the top and the magnet on my desk, but the turret on is a bit more recessed. So I used a couple more magnets to push it in.

Now for the Befehlspanzer III, this is an uparmoured variant of the Ausfahrung L. I did not want to make one with the laundry rack on the back, so I went looking for command versions of the Panzer III.

I came across this one, which is obviously later than the one I am doing, but I decided to make something similar to this. The first picture itself is not very clear and that’s why I looked at other models doing a similar idea.

I used a bit of greenstuff to make the mount for the antenna on the rear and used the already existing mount on the side to mount one as well. I used some soft broom bristles as the antennas as I think this would be flexible enough for wargaming as well. I did not want to go for the forked antenna as I don’t want to make that at 1:100 scale and don’t think it would be strong enough for wargaming anyway. So these 2 antennas will do. With some of the excess greenstuff I prepared I did a couple more Kuban Cossack hats for the ZiS-3 gun crew on the Soviet side.