Panzer III j gun sight and other turret interior stuff

I am building Das Werk’s 1/16 Panzer III j. it comes with some rudimentary turret interior, but I like to flesh it out a bit as the doors and hatches are poseable and a good deal of the interior can be seen if the turret side doors are open. So far I added the pistol port handles on the inside, which is situated right next to the open door.

The coax machine gun on the right side provided, but the the left hand side the gunner’s position is free of any detail.

So can anyone point me to drawing or photos of the gun sight?

Also the model depicts a number of screw heads on the middle outside of turret roof. but it is unclear what the screws hold on the inside. my guess is an interior travel lock for the gun. Can anyone confirm?

1 Like

I have no pics as I didn’t detail the innards of mine, but you are correct about the screw heads. For the gun lock and a few other items that mount from the ceiling of the turret.

1 Like

Here’s something:




image

May help a little bit.
Ken

3 Likes

Thank you for the photos of the restored tank.
Its internal colours aren’t right ; it should be “ivory” instead of white, and the gun breech should not be green. Can you tell us who owns that tank?

The contents of it are very accurate; the cabling at the back, the distribution box, and the turret direction indicator drive shaft…
The front is great also, with the backup battery, the related switch, the long thin insulator board that bears a couple of electrical items, the clock indicator on the turret ring…and you can see not only the optical gun sight, but the parallelogram arm for the metal sighting bar.
It all looks good.

But you can’t see the traverse and elevation mechanism in those photos.

If you want more data, I suggest downloading the PDF manual from the Bushmakow archive. It covers versions E to J of the tank. It has diagrams like this, a plan view of the two traverse wheels. Unfortunately he has watermarked all the manuals in his library.

David

2 Likes

Nope, I just found them on the internet a while back. I posted them because they show a lot of what goes inside the turret. Unfortunately I don’t have anything that shows all the stuff attached to inside of the turret top. And yea, the colors are way off, but at least we know that.
Ken

1 Like

I’m pretty sure the tank featured in Tankerken’s photos is the Tank Museum vehicle at Bovingdon, before and after restoration. At least one of the photos matches those in the Haynes Manual on the Panzer III which is based on the Bovingdon one. I don’t know where the green breech comes from, but several Bovingdon vehicles seem to feature it. I’d recommend the book, it’s full of internal photos and pretty cheap on Amazon. While the colours are pretty iffy, I’ve noticed that vehicles painted the correct Elfenbein can come up looking white in flash photography.

1 Like