The UDK Schenkle is an iconic SF3D design. Mechanical/organic shapes coupled with wires and hoses all over the place. This is the Schenkle resin garage kit from 2012 and as far as I know, the only 1/35 Schenkle kit. Maybe 25-50 ever produced.
This is the second release of the kit which includes white metal leg and hip pieces to help with the weight of the final model. The turret is rotationally molded hollow but is still pretty heavy when all assembled. I picked this up last year from a friend that was getting out of MaK and selling off his kits.
The kit is a real beast to assemble. Lots of parts, lots of attachment points, seam lines, warped parts, flash, pin holes, etc to clean up. Most of the parts follow a logical assembly and are fairly easy to clean but there are just so many pieces. I'm not criticizing the kit manufacturer, it's just a tough model to kit. The are so many layers of detail and they did a great job researching, engineering, and matching the original. The original Schenkle was researched and document on the old Crasher Eddy web blog. Fortunatly it is still found online. Road to Schenkle
I started the kit early 2019 but set it aside after I got to a point where I needed to attach the legs. During a long Christmas break, I finally tackled these. I first made a wooden frame to support the torso horizontally then used this to set the hip joints and finally the legs. The white styrene cross rods were cut to fit as the cast resin ones were too short and warped. I also replaced a few cast parts with pieces form the Tamiya Matilda just becasue they were easier to clean up. It looks like a beast but the whole thing is so delicate. A notable replacement is the Panther copula. The kit one was molded closed so I ground it off and replaced it with a Panzer Art resin copula, it has very nice interior details.
Here are the final images:
A few in progress images:
I didn't take too many very early in-progress images and what images I did take I can't find so this is about as early as I have.
Here is the turret before the final primer coat. The two brass rods sticking out the back are present on some early photos of the Schenkle but it looks like they broke off or removed over the years.
It looks so amazing with a nice solid coat of primer. The thing is one of my favorite SF3D designs and I'm so glad I have one built up.
Initail base base coat with marbled white.
Color coat applied over base coat.
Markings and initial weathering
Weathering and details so far.
