Small Scale Military Headquarters

I just opened up the 21C Panzer, and have a few questions (that have probally been posted and answered previously):

a) If the tuirret is not removable, then how do you get the Commander figure out of the copula (his legs seem to be bent inside the turret and inaccessible)?

b) How do you "twist" the cannon's muzzle break to align the piece properly?

c) Why are the Schurtzen rail mounts included when the extra side skirts are not? If 21C offers the large side skirts as add-on accessories, then epoxy glue will still be necessary to attach the skirts to the rails. This will be a messy task for amatuers.

d) Does anyone else have clear glue spots on the turret's top near where the ring skirt mounts are? This is bad manual labor at the Hong Kong factory (talk about amatuers).

a) Force 'em out. Seriously. You may want to cut away some cardboard or twisties, but it basically comes down to elbow grease.

b) You have to break the hold if it is glued in place wrong. Just twist and snap. Mine was not glued so it could spin around freely and you could just put it in place and then glue it.

c) S2 & S3 will have skirts - asking why about the mounts on S1 leads to speculation....perhaps like drop tanks on the Red 3 FW-190 they do not belong but it would have been a waste to throw out 2000 drop tanks so they were included (I hope nobody has there Red 3 displayed with drop tank! )

d) Glue, missing pieces (one of mine had no bow mg - at all), demented parts....quite a few QC issues with the S1 Panzer - but still worth every penny .

First off, I'll direct you to the Panzer IV thread. I was active when these first came out, then inactive for a while, and then came back up when these tanks started showing at Wal Mart: viewtopic.php?t=672&highlight=panzer+iv+discussion

To answer your questions...

a.) You kind of have to use a little force and pull the Commander figure out. You may want to first remove the arms and especially the sidearm to make it easier. Keep the sidearms removed from the figures if you want to fit them easily in any of the hatches. You can take the turret off, save that it involves taking apart the entire vehicle in order to do so.

b.) I haven't attempted to fix the muzzle on my tank yet, but I would guess you would just hold the barrel in one hand and carefully twist the muzzlebreak with the other until the glue bonds loosen. The barrel is made of two plastic halves, and you could try to pry them apart using a small knife and then loosen the muzzlebreak.

c.) The schurtzen were left off intentionally, and the model is still accurate, even with the bare rails. You can see that here with this picture:



21c has shown the prototypes for an S2 and S3 Panzer IV that have the schurtzen. They can be found on the 21c site, I believe.

d.) I don't have the glue spots where you have them, but there are some elsewhere on mine. The Panzer IV's in general had lots of QC problems - the most common of which were broken muzzles. This was aparently due to a swithc to a lower-grade factory due to a fire at the other. the bubbletop P-47s released around the same time had QC issues as well. 21c has aparently acknoweleged these and will correct them on future releases.

That's one reason why I didn't purchase the S1 Panzer since it didn't come with the side armor. Can't wait for the S2 version!