Jakko’s Zvezda M4A2 Шерман, 1:35 scale

[Mini Me]

Looking at the Tech. dwg. indicates to me that the hatch opening is19 3/8", if your models hatch is longer than that, may be the reason for it colliding with the machine gun barrel brkt. Also I see that the dimensions are all ref'd. off the centerline of the turret's N/S E/W axis so you would need to check your model to see if all hatches brkts. hinge mounts etc. are in their proper places and go from there........how far are we down this "rabbit hole"

[Graeme C.]

Very impressed with the research & modifications you've done Jakko, looking at the engineering drawing for the loaders hatch vs the book drawing there is a discrepancy. Having worked in engineering for 35 years (14 years in a tank factory!) I know how often drawings & designs are changed, is it possible that there's a difference between as originally drawn & as built?

[Guest]

the Tech. dwg. indicates to me that the hatch opening is19 3/8", if your models hatch is longer than that, may be the reason for it colliding with the machine gun barrel brkt.

Yes, that is the problem: the hatch is just under a millimetre longer than it should be, and just over half a millimetre wider, off the top of my head. This is small enough that you wouldn’t see it unless there is something in the way, like that barrel.

Also I see that the dimensions are all ref'd. off the centerline of the turret's N/S E/W axis so you would need to check your model to see if all hatches brkts. hinge mounts etc. are in their proper places and go from there........how far are we down this "rabbit hole"

Not that far If you’re the kind of modeller who wants all that kind of thing right to that extent, then the solution is simple: buy an Asuka kit of an M4A2, not a Zvezda one Of course, for the price of one Asuka Sherman you can buy two to two-and-a-half Zvezda Shermans …

Very impressed with the research

The research isn’t mine — you get that for free if you post about things like detailling Sherman models on a forum that the aforementioned Kurt Laughlin also frequents

is it possible that there's a difference between as originally drawn & as built?

I don’t think so, if you look closely at photos of Sherman turrets then it’s quickly clear that the kit is wrong and the technical drawing isn’t.

[GerryW]

Had a catch up, interesting to read about the details - yet another incredible build happening.

[Mini Me]

Well Jakko, it's your call as to how deep you want to get into this kit.......you know what you are up against and I won't criticize you if you choose something less than "perfection" Have fun.... Rick H.

[rtfoe]

I always say if it doesn't make you dizzy by just looking at it then it should be just fine. :smiling2: Or having a rivet counter ( I normally call these guys out who don't build but criticize) missing it completely distracted by the level of the other corrections and never knew about it.

A missing hatch would have been a doozy though. :tears-of-joy:

Cheers,
Richard

[Lee Drennen]

Jakko Wow snuck this one under my radar. Very impressive build and a lot of informational history you have added very useful. I’ll try to keep up and thanks for joining us.

[Guest]

Had a catch up, interesting to read about the details - yet another incredible build happening.

Thanks It’s really just some substitutions of kit parts for better ones from the spares box, though, if you ask me …

Well Jakko, it's your call as to how deep you want to get into this kit.......

I like models to be accurate, but at the same time I’m not fussed about things being slightly off as long as they don’t look wrong. How difficult it is to correct is also a major factor — take the armour plates on the sides, for example: Zvezda has their placement clearly wrong, but correcting that is just a matter of looking up the real locations (they’re found in several sources) and converting the measurements to 1:35 scale. Anyone who knows the way around a calculator and a ruler can get these right Some other things are harder to correct, of course, but like I said before: this kit is good enough for most purposes, and really, it gets more right than it gets wrong. It could have been a really good Sherman for a really good price if Zvezda had done their best just a little bit more.

I always say if it doesn't make you dizzy by just looking at it then it should be just fine. :smiling2:

That seems as good a philosophy as any, yes. That hatch makes me dizzy

Very impressive build and a lot of informational history you have added very useful.

Thanks

[Guest]

At the front, I filled the locating holes for the brush guards for the headlights and horn, because although the Zvezda parts aren’t bad, they’re overly thick.

[ATTACH]447027[/ATTACH]

The best replacement for the brush guards would be thin metal, like from an etched set or scratchbuilt, but I don’t have any of the former nor the inclination to do the latter, so I went to Asuka again. Their kits almost invariably have both plastic parts and etched ones, so you will always have spares, and the plastic parts, though still a little thick due to moulding limitations, are much thinner than Zvezda’s:

[ATTACH]447028[/ATTACH]

On the left-hand side of the tank, I also replaced Zvezda’s horn by one from Asuka, which again you often get spare if you build one of their Shermans because they tend to include multiple types. The reason is that Zvezda made a very basic mistake with theirs: rather than moulding slots into the front, they have put ridges on. Given the small size, this is just about impossible to correct, so replacing it is far simpler.

Note also that I removed the plastic strip sand shield attachments at the front, because it was pointed out to me that they should be tapered a little, not straight. Attempting to correct them, I cut through by accident, and rather than make new ones, I went back to looking through my Sherman spares box. In that, I found attachment strips for an M4A3 that I had overlooked the other day, so I just took the front strips from that and stuck them to the model.

You may have spotted the U-shaped groove between the hatches on the hull deck. This is a ventilator opening, and the kit provides a cover that fits over it. Early, large-hatch M4A2 tanks didn’t have that fitted, so the part is essentially optional if you’re building this kit. I also put in all four driver’s periscopes, because most kits (including the Asuka ones) generally mould the fixed ones in the hull as closed. Another good point about this kit is that the driver’s periscopes can be turned to face in any direction, another minor issue with the Asuka kits, which mould the rotating bases integrally with the hatches.

On the back, the tail lights are both good and bad at the same time. Zvezda moulds them as being attached by a little bent pipe (through which the electrical cable runs), which is how it should be. Most other manufacturers mould a little stalk onto the rear deck and have you glue the light to it instead. On the other side, the face of the light is very poor. However, as I don’t seem to have any Sherman tail lights, I have used the Zvezda part anyway:

[ATTACH]447029[/ATTACH]

The brush guards at the rear are moulded thinner than the ones at the front, oddly enough, so I did use the kit parts here.

[Guest]

On to the suspension. Zvezda has made a couple of decisions here that make it awkward to get the bogies to look as good as they could. First there is the lack of detail in the wheels that I already mentioned, but here is a full comparison between the green Asuka wheels and the grey Zvezda ones:

[ATTACH]447633[/ATTACH]

The grey wheel in the top row is Dragon, for another comparison in terms of detail. The dished wheels in the middle are not normally seen on Soviet M4A2 tanks with 75 mm guns, but were used on those with 76 mm guns (and thus, the later turret type) and I think also on some USMC 75 mm M4A2s in the Pacific, but don’t quote me on that There is no dished idler wheel, but that’s OK because those were only used after the war.

I will be using the Asuka wheels because of their better detail, but that gives the problem that the Asuka axle holes are larger than Zvezda’s, so some kind of bushing is needed to adapt them. I opted to drill out the wheels, inset plastic rod and then drill a hole for the Zvezda axles in that:

[ATTACH]447630[/ATTACH]

The main reason for this slightly difficult method is that I didn’t have tube of a diameter that would fit both, or even one of the two, so drilling out the wheels for plastic rod that I did have, was the simplest solution in the end. You can do this without a lathe or any other fancy equipment: just a pin vice and two drills (one the size of the plastic rod, the other that of the kit axles) will do. The drill self-centres in the wheel holes, while drilling out the middle of plastic rod is also easy because it tends to centre in that as well — especially if there happens to be an air bubble, which is common in the thicker types of plastic rod.

The Asuka idler wheels need no adjustment: the holes in them are only slightly larger than the Zvezda axles, so they can go straight onto those.

Next, the skids on top of the bogies are overly thick, and really need to be thinned down for a better appearance. This is easy enough to do by carving, scraping and/or filing the inside edge of the skid on the outer bogie half; there is no need to bother with the inside, as it will be entirely out of sight. Compare what a difference this little job makes:

[ATTACH]447628[/ATTACH][ATTACH]447629[/ATTACH]

That done, I could assemble the bogies as per the instructions. This poses no problems at all, as the parts fit well. The main issue here is that the skid has been moulded integrally with both halves of the bogie body, meaning there is a big seam running all along its middle that has to be dealt with. Again, filing it down worked fine, even if the rounded front was a little tricky, and while I was doing that I also filed the front face of the bogie flat. There are four screw holes missing there too, which is not surprising since no manufacturer has yet moulded those as far as I know, so I marked them out with a template I made and drilled them out. I also added five bolt heads to the top of each bogie; there should be six, the the top rear inside one will be all but invisible, so I didn’t bother:

[ATTACH]447632[/ATTACH]

The full suspension, then, including the Zvezda drive sprockets:

[ATTACH]447631[/ATTACH]

I used two spoked wheels on one of the bogies, because as mentioned I only had ten of the other wheels, and figuring that bogie damage would be somewhat common, I opted to have one bogie with different wheels.

Oh, yeah, before I forget: Zvezda tells you to paint the outside of the idler wheels (parts E15) and the return rollers (parts D2) with tyre colour. This is wrong: these wheels were completely made of steel and so were entirely painted in the basic vehicle colour. Only the roadwheels had rubber tyres.

[Guest]

The tracks are link-and-length, which makes them far easier to assemble than most Sherman tracks in hard plastic, but their detail is about the same as those. They also have some links and end connectors moulded at an angle to ensure the track looks good where it bends around wheels, and the top run is a little wavy so it hangs over the return rollers and skids. Though there are ejector pin marks on the insides of some links, these are easy to clean up with a little scraping. Then it’s just a matter of glueing them to the model per the instructions:

[ATTACH]447708[/ATTACH][ATTACH]447709[/ATTACH]

Well, mostly. Zvezda tells you to put five links around the drive sprocket, but I found the track sits better if you use only four, and out the fifth at the very front of the bottom run, so between part E19 (the short stretch between sprocket and first road wheel) and E3 (the bottom run).

Oh yeah, fit the sprockets to the hull before adding the track to them. The sprockets have locating pins that only allow them to go in one position, probably to ensure that the tracks fit correctly.

Oddly, I had one link left, which is very strange because both sides would need the same number and the kit provides no spares, but both tracks look fine so all is well. That spare link does come in handy to more easily show a small problem with the tracks:

[ATTACH]447710[/ATTACH]

They’re on backwards … This is the T49 type of track, which is made entirely of steel (aside from rubber track-pin bushings inside the links) and has one wide and two narrow bars per link. As normally installed, the wide bar should be at the bottom of the link at the front of the tank, but Zvezda has it at the top. This would not be impossible, because these tracks can be (and sometimes were) installed the wrong way round on the real tank, but you can’t fix it on the model because of the undulating top run. That won’t fit properly if you reverse it, even though all the other track parts can simply be put on back to front.

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Great stuff as usual. Replacing parts with more accurate parts from another kit helps with accuracy but often throws up problems to solve - like the axle holes :thinking:
The track on the wrong way - common with models, even at shows and whenever it is mentioned a reference photo is found to show it happened in reality.
Jim

[Guest]

Replacing parts with more accurate parts from another kit helps with accuracy but often throws up problems to solve - like the axle holes :thinking:

You would almost think all these different manufacturers don’t take each other’s parts into account when designing a kit …

The track on the wrong way - common with models, even at shows and whenever it is mentioned a reference photo is found to show it happened in reality.

It certainly happened in the real world, with all kinds of vehicles, but to release a model that has it as standard is, IMHO, sloppy …

[Graeme C.]

Some good improvements & added detail Jakko, Strange about the tracks being the wrong way round.

[Guest]

Agreed, and it occurred to me the other day that this kit would have been a pretty good substitute for buying a set of separate-link tracks for some other Sherman — I mean, it costs less than some of those and you get a bunch of other useful parts as a bonus — if only the tracks had been the right way round

As I said before, the major problem with this kit is the turret. I already corrected the shape reasonably well, but I still had the hatch to sort out. The problem for making it closed is that the loader’s hatch lays pretty much flush with the roof, so you kind of need to scribe its outline — but doing that neatly is not within my skill, I think. Luckily, I hit on another solution.

First, I filled in the hatch opening with plastic card and putty:

[ATTACH]447927[/ATTACH]

Just some card cut to approximately the hatch shape, so it fits inside, and some more card underneath to strengthen it (mainly because of the sanding needed on the putty). I also cut out the hinge from the turret, so I could replace it later rather than scratchbuild a new one, and filled the resulting opening at the same time, of course.

The next step was to make a piece of masking tape to the shape and size of the hatch, and stick it in the correct location:

[ATTACH]447928[/ATTACH][ATTACH]447929[/ATTACH]

The hatch is a very simple shape: just two half-circles of 12 mm, connected by a rectangle of 4 mm wide between them. If you’re unsure how to draw it, just draw a line, then two more at right angles to it and 4 mm apart. Take a circle template, centre the 12 mm hole on those transverse lines and draw a semicircle.

With the tape on the turret, I mixed putty from a tube with the solvent I glue my models with, then applied it all over the turret with an old, stiff brush:

[ATTACH]447930[/ATTACH]

Trying to avoid brush strokes and adding a stippled texture with the brush before the putty dried, to give a cast texture all over. Once the putty had dried, I sanded it to tone down the texture again, because just stippling is far too coarse and rough. After that, I took off the tape to leave a hatch-shaped depression:

[ATTACH]447931[/ATTACH]

I had hoped this was enough, but it doesn’t look like a hatch — it looks like an area machined flat in the casting. So I drew another hatch, but now on very thin plastic card, with an 11 mm template instead of 12 mm and with a sharp needle rather than a pencil. That last bit was to make it larger than a pencilled hatch would have been. After cutting it out, I glued it to the turret as the hatch, then cut off the hinge and springs from the kit hatch and glued them to it as well:

[ATTACH]447932[/ATTACH]

Removing the hinge and springs is not that hard: saw alongside both sides of the spring, then carefully slice off the thickness of the turret that is still attached to the springs. The part of the hinge that was on the turret, I filed down by pressing it with my finger against a file and moving it back and forth until the thickness of the turret had been removed.

The photo above is of the completed turret, with everything else in place as well. Here is what it looks like in total:

[ATTACH]447933[/ATTACH][ATTACH]447934[/ATTACH]

The machine gun is in its stowed position, for which I had to slightly modify the clip on the rear of the hatch. The gun is still loose for painting.

Slightly odd is that Zvezda has moulded a little lug on the underside of the commander’s cupola ring, so that it will only fit with the machine gun pintle at 12 o’clock. On the real tank, the cupola can rotate 360 degrees, so I cut off the lug and turned the cupola to the side a bit, for interest.

And then, the build seems to be complete:

[ATTACH]447935[/ATTACH][ATTACH]447936[/ATTACH][ATTACH]447937[/ATTACH]

Except that I realised right after taking these photos, that I still need to add the straps that hold the tools on the tank.

Oh yeah, and I replaced the shovel by one from the spares box, for this reason:

[ATTACH]447938[/ATTACH]