Calling this one done. This project got more complex than I thought it would; I started wanting to do something interesting with stowage, and ended up spending a month or two fashioning wood, metal, and epoxy putty bits. Then I discovered the enclosed tracks were not great, which meant for the first time ever I was motivated to do a diorama.
So, this is a M4 Sherman, with the later 76mm gun, welded hull, wet stowage. The Trumpeter kit is adaquite, but not great. Aside from the awful vinyl tracks, the tie down points were rendered as solid plastic wedges; easy to replace by cutting out the wedges, then using your tiny pin vise drill to make holes and run wire through said holes, but still. It's not all bad, though: the kit comes with 2 turrets, and three different suspension assemblies. The two unused ones here are the easy 8 suspension upgrade, and one like I built, except one piece, so easy assembly for say wargaming.
If you've seen tank pictures, you know they are usually caked in mud. I went for that, plus all the stowage and improvised armor Western Front Shermans typically had.
Usually Shermans used spare track that they could use, but the kit had no spares at all, so I went through my parts box and found a bunch of spares from previous German tanks I've built. The wheels lashed together are a road wheel left over from a Panther G I built a few years ago, and two rear drive wheels from the Sherman kit. Everything is secured to a frame rather than glued straight on. The turret tracks are on a thin frame of scrap photo-etch metal, and the hull stuff is anchored to wood.
The woodwork aspect is new; I used craft/popsicle sticks to create the improv armor on this side, while staves and other smaller bits I made from bamboo toothpicks. The craft sticks I sliced to approprate thickness with a razor saw, then sanded them until they looked right. The toothpicks I sanded down until I'd reached what I wanted; this started as making wood handles for the pioneer tools (I really hate it when these are molded on, so I erased them) and expanded from there.
After a few experiments, I made a tarp from a square of material from a latex glove. In the shot below, you can see the tow cable I made from scrap wire and leftover eye holes from my parts box. For those with little money, electrical cable and scrapped appliances and electronics can give you a lot of useful things. Underneath the big tarp are some tarps made from sticking plaster, a ration box made of real wood, two other boxes from my spares, and two jerry cans in a metal rack I made out of scrap PE. You can of course, just see the jerry cans and nothing else, because my idea of a mesh bag tiedown fell through. All the wires tying things down are, you can probably tell, wires, which were the only thing I had on-hand that looked right to scale.
The little ammo boxes on the, er, 'rear parcel shelf' are made from miliput and first cut, then sanded down to the proper shape. They are supposed to be .30 / .50 cal ammo boxes.
On the front, I built a wooden frame to hold a generous amount of Panther/Tiger tracks in place. there's a bottom board holding the works, held on by PE squares anchoring it to the tank hull. Looking at period pictures, this was one of about a million different ways Sherman crews tried to make their tanks more survivable. This includes everything from sandbags, to actually setting concrete on their tanks, to elaborate trellises filled with sandbags, to scavenged tracks, to actual scavenged armor (IE the front plate of dead tanks, usually Shermans.) My incomplete tracks were 'filled in' with a chopped off bit of a zip tie.
The base is a bit of board I waterproofed, then glopped some celluclay on. It's the first time I've used this paper mache / clay mix, and it is good stuff. I painted it with a dirty mix of black and brown oils. Mud in my experince is really mono-chromatic, so I tried to make it look typical. I then slopped that paint color onto the lower bits of the tank. To get the blotchy thin mud effect over everything, I gave the take two coats of thinly diluted browns/tans, and left little masking compound patches everywhere, which after airbrushing I removed with an old toothbrush. All the layers are protected by future.
The turret was much simpler. The .50 cal MG had to have its really ill-formed handles chopped off, and I never got around to replacing them.
Got a post for the M4/Sherman, but it will have to wait after the current edition of
Amerika bombers is done.
