I started happening upon photos of 2 SS-Pz.Div.
Das Reich Panther Ds in Russia online a while ago and was immediately attracted by their camouflage scheme of wide bands of green and red-brown sparated by thin stripes of dark yellow. Some of these online sources featured photos of Ernst Barkmann's mount '401' when he was still a gunner, so I decided to try this subject out.
Problem is, I couldn't discern any real zimmerit pattern in the photos - it always seemed to have been very sloppily applied, almost as if by hand or with a broom. The green stuff you see in this photo is Tamiya green polyester putty, which I was surprised to discover is basically Bondo (or at least that's what it smells like!) I applied this with a cut-down Testors vinyl paintbrush (see - they've got like a million uses) and did some very minimal sanding down.
OF COURSE, what then happened is literally the day after I applied the zimmerit I saw a photo in a book of Barkmann's Panther D and sure enough it had a very subtle ridge pattern to it. For an example, check out the Panther Ds in Dai Nippon Kaiga's
Der Deutsch Panzer und Militarfahrzeuge on pp.102-107 incl., attributed to Pz.Regt. 39.
Another stumbling block was that '401' didn't have one of those armoured covers for the deep fording equipment either, and I'd already gone through the trouble of correcting the one that came with the DML kit per the sketches in Panzer Tracts 5-1:
OK, the photo's not the greatest, but you can see I rebuilt the hinge mechanism, hollowed the aperture out and added some PE screen and rebuilt the flange with styrene tubing. Anyway, the upshot of this is I'm still doing a Das Reich Panther D c. autumn 1943, just not Barkmann's '401'... I'm pretty sure there were Panthers out there with the zimmerit applied as per my model (I hope).
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