Assembly required minimal effort. The gun barrel was replaced with one from a Dragon kit as again the kit-supplied one is somewhat anaemic. Plastic strip was added to the hull sides for the schürtzen to hang from. The most work was done on the rear hull, as the style of exhausts supplied by MB are inappropriate for an Ausf. G. I scratch-built these from odds and ends, but as I noted in my build of the Airfix Panther, you could just do a straight swap of parts with that kit. The Panther engine was notable for generating a tremendous amount of heat, and several methods were tried for heat dissipation to prevent engine fires. In this case the exhaust pipes were given some covers, but even this was insufficient, as will be seen.
Minimal work was required on the turret after the gun barrel is replaced. The PE MG ring seen here comes with the Dan Taylor Modelworks schürtzen sheet for the Panther G.
The problem of the missing tools was again easily solved with Dan Taylor's Accessories set. In these photos you can see I have added a spare piece from a Dragon 1/72 Panther kit, namely the raised ventilation cover on the rear deck -- present on some but not all Ausf Gs, check your references! And again I solved the tracks problem by stealing a link-&-length set from a Revell 1/72 Panther kit, trimmed down to fit the smaller scale. Finally I added the front fenders scratched up from some plastic card.
The kit was then primed and given a base coat, and there it sat for over a year, until I decided it was about time to finish it off. There were two additional minor points of construction required: the unit that this vehicle was from added a field-modification to their Panthers, namely a plate of steel behind the exhausts on the rear hull. It's not known for certain what this modification was for, but the dominant theory is that it was to deflect yet more heat from the rear deck. This was a simple addition with plastic card. Then of course the PE skirts were added.
Painting was finished by hand with (mostly) LifeColor acrylics, based on a scheme depicted in the book To the Last Bullet, with decals from the Bison Decals set of the same name. Sealed with a coat of Future and given a heavy mud wash using chalk pastels and LifeColor Tensochrome, and I'm calling it done.
