Mercedes L4500A (Zvezda) Chapter 7: Painting

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With the kit fully built in sub assemblies I plan to show this as a late war supply vehicle towing a trailer which has been pushed off the road on a Northern France or Belgium road during the retreat to the Rhine in 1944.

Preparing softskins for paint is often a tricky business. For one there is rarely anywhere suitable on the vehicle to hold or suspend it safely. Then there is the issue of completing the interior before masking glass areas to complete the exterior. I often prepare at the building stage and this almost always make the whole project a far more enjoyable experience.

I have always been intrigued as to how other modellers approach fixing painted sub-assemblies as paint and glue don’t get along at all well.

I've always approached this issue using a variety of methods. For small areas it is easy enough to use a little paint thinner or to scrape paint off with a sharp blade, and for larger areas masking tape works well. Another alternative and one that is most often employed on windscreens is masking fluid, of which there are many products on the market. I’ve not had many successful results with masking fluid and have always relied on masking tape. However the connecting areas of the L4500’s engine and cab are particularly difficult to mask with tape so I figured I would give it another go. This time I am trying Abteilung 502’s Liquid Mask. I have checked how easy it will be to remove under paint on some test pieces and so far, so good.

My sub-assemblies consist of four main sections; the chassis/cargo area, the cab in two parts and the engine. TBH I should really have kept the chassis and cargo area separate as I described earlier in the cargo area chapter. For one they would have been easier to airbrush and secondly handling is now a little trickier due to the combined weight. Individual parts to paint include both doors and the wheels.

 

With masking liquid applied to all connections the rear wheels can be conveniently masked using the kit's rear hubs, now that they are redundant.

I can’t say I have seen too many decent mid to late period images of the metal cab L4500A. There seem to be far more of the Maultier and wooden cab varients. I would imagine later war vehicles would have been base coated in Dunkelgelb from the factory and any camo field applied, depending on the season and the terrain. The late war vehicle depicted in the kit has a very neat tri-tonal pattern but most images show a wavy obviously hand sprayed pattern. The cargo trailer will be painted with camo so I will see how the base coat lays down first, then decide how to proceed. 

Priming After hearing good things about Mr Surfacer Primer 1500 and wanting a little more application control versus a rattle can, I figured I would test it out on the L4500. Mr Nightshift swears by the stuff and although it’s certainly far from a healthy alternative to the humble rattle can, I at least don't have to go through the rigmarole of organising space in the garage and negotiating wind and rain! I opted for the black variant and mixing it roughly 50-50 with thinners I gave the model two thin coats. It appeared to airbrush well but I was a little disappointed in the grainy finish I was left with. Certainly not as smooth as I get with Tamiya Fine surface or even Mr Surfacer's rattle can. I will have to put it down to either the ambient temps or my mix ratio so will give it a chance before I dismiss it entirely. Back to the L4500. With soft skins always being a handful to handle under paint due to the lack of any real sturdy surface to hold with any handheld device I made the best of Tamiya's faithful turntable. All the other sub-assemblies were held by a mixture of cocktail sticks and blu tack. As already mentioned I was going to model this on a few pics of abandoned vehicles pushed off the road. The L4500 would be towing an enclosed cargo trailer. An Anhanger (mehrachs.) mit geschlossenem. Easy for me to say I know, but apparently that’s what they were called! After deciding which way the two vehicles would sit on the base I figured I really would only have to concentrate on getting the paint down precisely on three sides of each vehicle, as both would lie at an angle in the ditch against a hedge. Base coat I figured I would go with a hint of modulation and would grade the base coat horizontally with four different shades. All would be with Tamiya acrylics, and all would be thinned with Mr Levelling thinner to try and mitigate the less than smooth surface I had managed to achieve with the primer coat. First up was a shadow mix comprising Nato Brown XF-68 and the original Dark yellow XF-60. The second was a pure XF-60 followed by their newer XF-88. Lastly a highlight mix of the XF-88 with some flat white XF-2 To start the ball rolling the cab would have to be painted before closing. As per earlier in the assembly process I had, excluding the doors, deliberately left the cab and front end in just two sub-assemblies to ease the painting of the dash and to leave no visible joint line on the roof. The joint points were treated with masking fluid so I could easily remove the paint and get a good solid connection. The kit comes with zero dash decals so some will need to be sourced. I found a couple that fitted nicely and painted the remaining two. A fire extinguisher decal was also employed. Just the middle two mixed base colours were used on the interior. Once the paint was down, I carefully painted the window seals in Vallejo Dark Rubber and then attached the screen with PVA glue. Once a tight connection was made four tiny dabs of rubberised CA were made internally in each corner to prevent the window falling inside the cab when masking it. Same for the small window on the rear panel. Buff oils were then used to highlight some raised details before applying a light pin wash of MIG Dark wash. A splash of X-35 was used before the decals and then a coat of VMS satin finished things off. Once left overnight the two main cab components were fixed together.  The large item on the steering column in the pic below is a piece of card that held the screen in place when fitting. I must remember to remove it! Some tidy up will also be required at some of the connection points. The windscreen needs a clean internally with white spirit.   Moving onto the main chassis and wooden cargo bed, all four previous Tamiya paint mixes were used again with the highlight mix sprayed down from above. The engine was left in primer as I will highlight what little detail remains visible through the open side panel with Vallejo acrylics in a later step before the cab is fitted. I originally intended to paint both the L4500 and towed trailer in plain Dunkelgelb but I recently purchased some camo colours from MRP and figured I would try these for the two additional camo colours. These paints require no thinning and with a low psi setting achieve nice fine lines even with my IWATA CR-P 0.4mm needle. Not wanting to balls-up the truck finish, I used the trailer as a test bed. Happy with how the MRP olive green and red brown had performed I decided to paint the truck in a more blotchier camo pattern. This effect is well documented, and, in the end, I simply used the L4500 painting guide as a rough template. For the wooden cargo portion, I made sure the camo colours didn’t get too opaque as I wanted a faded look.

The wheels have also been blocked in with their base colours. The tyres were first airbrushed with Tamiya Tyre black. After much deliberation I dropped the Hussar wheels I originally modified in favour of the more dimensional accurate Panzerart ones. Although this meant a little more work on both the new front wheels (cutting out the incorporated hub face) and attaching the kits rear hub domes to the rear of the new rear wheels, I am confident they will look more aesthetically pleasing.

 

Mercedes OM 67/4 engine painted and weathered. Only a small section will be seen through the open panel so I didn't go mad.

 

Camouflage painting

The camo was completed using Olive Green and Red Brown MRP acrylics. These paints spray beautifully at low pressures and tight camo pattern demarcation lines can be effortlessly obtained. All that is then required is to block in the pattern. After a coat of Tamiya semi coat varnish mixed with a drop of clear yellow the decals were applied and then sealed.

A quick word on the decals in the kit. The two decal marking options show one for an early war grey paint scheme and one for a late war tri-tonal option. The unit markings offered for the late war option never operated on the western front in 1944 so if authenticity is of importance check your refs. I eventually settled on a 116th Pz Div decal sourced from the spares box. Also, the weight stencil in mine was quite blurred so I decided not to use it

Pin washing

Pin washes begin with two Abteilung dark brown oil mixes. The darker of the two will tackle the lower portions and the lighter the upper.

The metalwork portions of the truck all look a bit vivid and shiny at present but subsequent filters and washes will tone them down.

My last painting stage steps before applying dust and dirt layers was to patina the cab and metal component paintwork using both the hairspray technique and some oil dot fading, but after experimenting on a piece of card with the tri-tonal camo sprayed on I decided against it. It muddied up the camo and I just wasn’t getting the effect I was after.

I then proceeded to both highlight some raised components and further darken shadowy areas with oil paints. At the same time, I added some subtle streaking. The items on display in the open locker were brush painted and the exhaust pipe was given a light wash of grey.

Without any oil fading the decals and the metalwork areas still remained glossy so two fine coats of matt varnish mixed with a little buff were added. With the highlights and shadows dealt with and now having a nice matt surface again I was happy to proceed with some dirt and dust effects.

In much the same way I had started the weathering layers on the trailer, a dust colour mix using Tamiya German Grey & Buff was made up. After two coats of hairspray had fully dried, I started applying the dust by airbrush from the front and lower areas of the chassis. Spraying at a low pressure and trying to direct it into all the areas that dust would naturally gather when kicked up from the road.

The next job was to agitate the dust layer with water to create streaks, scratches, and areas where the dust had been disturbed and removed from the surface. Working in small areas with a variety of tools the dust layer on the cab and doors were first to get the treatment.

I’m happy that these acrylic dust effects can now form the basis for future weathering with enamels and oils.

 

Chapter 8