Construction Begins....

I always start work on my tanks with the suspension. In the picture below you can see that the left and right suspension assemblies have been mounted on the chassis.  Extra care is needed to ensure that the torsion bars are mounted in the right slots. Failure to do so will ruin the kit.  It's hard to see from the photos but the chassis and the suspension assemblies have all been painted in a very light base gray surface primer ( Vallejo 73.601) .

The right hand suspension assembly

The left hand suspension assembly

The road wheels, idlers, and drive sprockets need to be prepared next.  The 32 road wheels, once removed from their trees, all need to be edge sanded to remove their molding seams. This is best accomplished by turning each wheel on a Dremel tool and lightly sanding the edges.  One must be careful not to overheat the plastic during this procedure and thereby damage a wheel.  The idlers and the drive sprockets are then assembled and set aside.  All of these items were  then given the same light gray primer coat as the chassis and suspension assemblies.

The 32 Road Wheels

The Idlers and Drive Sprokets

The suspension assembly, road wheels, idlers, and drive sprockets will all be finished in a lighten panzer gray.  While it is my intention to finish this vehicle in a desert camouflage a lightened panzer gray may seem to be an odd choice, Not really.  If you look at all the WOT vehicles in game, you will notice that this area of the vehicle always stays the national colour of the faction no matter what camouflage is applied.  In the case of Germany that colour is a lightened panzer gray. While I cannot say for sure, I'm pretty certain that this has something to do with how the vehicles are rendered in game for performance reasons.   The WOT screen shot of the E-100 below clearly shows the panzer gray road wheels

Side view of in-game E-100. Note panzer gray road wheels