Bergepanzer III turret conversions

 As Megablitz, NQM and my own variant of One Hour WW2 require repair vehicles, I thought it was about time the Germans had some proper ones instead of just relying on heavy halftracks. By far and away the easiest one to do was the Bergepanzer III. Now, I did actually order one from a manufacturer, but they let me down and the entire order vanished. I am in the process of trying to rectify that, so I will leave the guilty party nameless for now. Suffice to say they aren't getting any more business from me until it is sorted.

Anyway, in the absence of a commercial one, time to do some converting.

The Bergepanzer III essentially removed the turret, and replaced it with a large (overhanging) wooden box, with a crane and various other repair stuff attached like unditching beams etc. Rather than make these permanent conversions, I thought I'd do them as removeable turret replacements so I could still use the original vehicles as gun tanks if needed.

I built two at the same time, one to go on one of my early war grey PP Panzer IIIs, and another to go one of my sandy coloured Zvezda Pz IIIs for desert and late war use. The dimensions of the boxes are identical on both vehicles, but naturally the hull dimensions are (slightly) different, the PP tank has a huge spare wheel moulded onto one of the mudguards, and where the PP tank has a nice hole in the hull for the turret, the Zvezda one has a post for the turret.

The actual lining up of the boxes on the hull for each vehicle was therefore different, and I had to add a turret post to the early war one, and drill a (large) hole for the late war one.

Once I was happy with the size and location of the basic boxes, I added all the stowage. They both have unditching beams made from balsa, and various bits of spare stowage added internally. The cranes are made from sprue, and the locations are slightly different on each model as I'm using the position of the feet to stablise the 'turret' against the engine deck air intakes - essentially they stop the new turret rotating in either direction.

Crew access was via a narrow wooden channel into the hull at the rear of the deck, presumably to protect the access from being fouled by maintenance gear. I made these out of very thin plasticard once everything else was dry.

I didn't find any plans on the internet, but I did find plenty of photos, so I developed these highly detailed plans myself by eyeball. The main thing to get right was the dimension of the base plate and location of the turret post, once that was done, everything else fell into place. I went with 6mm high turret sides as these looked about right.

And here they both are with the tops painted.

The sandy one is done in Dark Yellow to match the hull, but this will fit any of my half dozen Zvezda Pz IIIs. 

I picked out the stowage in a range of greens and greys and gave the whole thing and ink wash and a light drybrush. I did the planking afterwards with a 0.1mm liner pen. Ideally I would have used planked plasticard, but I don't have any. The real planking was pretty rough and ready.

The other one I did in Panzer Grey, with similar washes and highlights to the other one. I added a crew figure to this one, the recovery crews seemed to wear a mix of black overalls or light khaki fatigues, but I already had a (very) old PP panzer crew figure in black, so I chopped his legs off and put him in the access tunnel. I painted a commander to go in the other tank, but in the end decided not to bother, I'll save him for another vehicle.

The turret post on the bottom of one of them. It was a bit of a pig getting the location correct, in the end I used a temporary post in the hole with some wet black paint on the top, and used it to mark to location on the underside of the card.

And, look, they can convert back at the drop of a hat!

I'm really pleased with those, I expect they will get a lot of use.