[And yes, I'm aware (now) that I messed up the suspension -- port and starboard are not mirror images, they should run in opposite directions -- another inaccuracy of the base kit that I forgot to double-check at the time I built it.]
I then filled in the hollow sponsons and added the stepped angled pieces at the rear hull.
[The underside of the lower hull -- the bolts and hatches -- is not at all accurate either, but at the time I couldn't be bothered correcting it, since it won't be seen any way.]
The turret also needed work, of course. I sealed the hollow bottom with plastic card, providing a more accurate outline to give me a better idea where the putty would need to go to reshape the rear of the turret.
As can be seen I also added the rear turret hatch and cupola MG ring.
The rather pathetic under-sized gun barrel supplied with the kit was replaced with a plastic one sourced from a Dragon 1/72 Panther kit, and the coaxial MG and gun sights drilled out of the gun mantle. (The later Ausf A and all Ausf G had a single gun sight, unlike the kit part which features the twin sights used on earlier models.)
I scratched up the rear hull crew storage containers from plastic card.
The road wheels were then added (I tried to improve the hub detail a little, with middling success) and then applied zimmerit by spreading Tamiya putty over the appropriate surfaces, thinning it with liquid cement, and using a small screwdriver to imprint the pattern. This process was not what I'd call completely successful but for this scale I don't think it looks too bad.
You can see here how I modified the left-hand exhaust to add the twin cooling pipes found on this model of Panther. It turns out to have been wasted effort, since both the Matchbox and Fujimi/Nitto Panther kits (both of which represent the Ausf G) come with this type of exhaust already molded -- quite inappropriately, since they were not used on the Ausf G! I could have just swapped the Airfix part for either the MB or Fujimi part. Oh well.
The tracks supplied with the Airfix kit are of course worse than useless, but I was at a bit of a quandary as to how to replace them (the tracks that come with the MB and Fujimi kits are no better). Finally I decided to steal the link-and-length tracks from a Revell 1/72 Panther kit as they are quite nicely detailed. Of course they won't fit on the smaller-scale Airfix hull without modification -- I trimmed off the edges of each run of track. Not an ideal solution but they look OK to me regardless.
Finally it was time to add the final odds-and-ends, which consists largely of all of the tools commonly found on these tanks that Airfix helpfully completely neglected to supply. (Matchbox also sadly omitted them; the Fujimi kit has them, but they're not very good representations.) Fortunately Dan Taylor supplies a resin "AFV Accessories" set that appears to be explicitly designed to fill this gap; he also supplies PE side-skirts which would also prove useful (although they could be knocked up from plastic card without too much trouble).
[It should be noted that the resin set curiously only includes one towing shackle (the crescent-shaped item) when there should be two; when I pointed this out to Mr Taylor he indicated that he may amend future releases of the set to fix this (and then kindly supplied me with an extra shackle which I used on the MB kit). For this kit, I scratch-built the missing shackle.]
I also cut and shaped the kit's missing front fenders from plastic card (another omission that the Matchbox kit shares with this one, incidentally). Note that the kit's missing front headlamp is also supplied with the Dan Taylor "Accessories" set.
All of this was completed early last year. Not photographed at that time was the beginning of painting (the kit was primed and given a base coat of LifeColor Dunkelgelb). At that point I stopped (for various reasons I won't go into here, but a house-move was part of it) and I have only just recently pulled everything out of storage and decided that I should finish it. The PE skirts were attached and the camouflage pattern was applied by brush (again using LifeColor acrylics; I also made use of some Tamiya and Gunze Aqueous paints). (I would have preferred to apply the disruptive pattern with an airbrush for a more accurate "feathered" appearance but my current accomodation is not airbrush-friendly at this time, so all my painting will be by hand for the immediate future.) The scheme is one of those provided in the Echelon Fine Details 1/72 "Panther" set representing various Panther D & A vehicles.
When painting was completed it was sealed with a coat of Future; decals were then applied and the kit weathered with chalk pastels and LifeColor Tensochrome colours.
The photos are not of the best quality, I'm afraid, my natural light was fading fast. There's some "frosting" visible on the front of the vehicle, that seems to be a reaction from the matt varnish -- not quite sure what it's reacting to, since it hasn't frosted anywhere else. I'll see if I can clean that up with some IPA. Annoying ....
All of this goes to prove that you can create a fairly-decent representation of the Panther from the Airfix kit, but you need to put in a lot of work (and be prepared to do a lot of cross-kitting and scratch-building) -- in my mind, it's much more effort than the kit is really worth, assuming you're aiming for a display model. Unfortunately in 1/76 the alternatives are quite limited. The Matchbox and Fujimi kits are not terrible representations of an Ausf G (as we will shortly see), but they're not great, either (and not that easy to find these days in any case). That pretty much just leaves resin kits (e.g., Milicast) -- relatively expensive and not really kits, as such, so you miss out on the fun of building. In 1/72 there are a great many more choices of kit but so far as I'm aware there's not a single one of them that doesn't need a surprising amount of effort "out of the box" (assuming accuracy is your intent). I wish Airfix would replace this terrible old thing with a nice modern kit! -- although if the recent "King Tiger" kit is anything to go by, even then we'd likely still have to deal with headaches like applying zimmerit around moulded-on tools, and terrible vinyl tracks ... but at least we would have the basic shapes correct, and maybe even an acknowledgement from Airfix that Panthers were never used in North Africa.
