Jakko’s Sherman BARV

[Guest]

Possibly, yes, I think. The chief problems I actually ran in to (other than blowing nearby stuff away as well as almost burning my fingers with the hair dryer ) were heating them up far enough to properly bend, and that it was very hard to hold the part in the jig and bend it evenly without the corners coming up. I could have kept faffing about with the parts and bent them into shape, but all in all, the plastic card solution probably took no longer but was a lot less bother

[papa 695]

Sorry I’ve not posted on this one yet Jakko, really liking the work you’re putting into this. Looking very good so far.

[Guest]

Thanks

[Neil Merryweather]

For what it's worth,it's a good idea to bend the plastic and then cut it to size afterwards, which would allow you to preserve things like the sharp corners

[Guest]

You mean cut it oversize where the panels meet, so they overlap, and then cut away the excess? Yes, it probably would have been better to do that, but also trickier in having to cut the parts when they’re already curved. I will try that way on my next Sherman BARV

[Guest]

Okay, on then to the next bit of major work: the splash plate around the roof of the superstructure. Resicast usually gives you plenty of spares for parts you might lose or mess up, and these are no exception:

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That’s plates for two BARVs, plus one jig to form them on, because they’re cast flat but need to be curved outward. The instructions tell you to use a hair dryer, and I prefer that to the hot-water method of heating resin for shaping, but … these just did not want to cooperate. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say I’ve seen that I’m not the only one having trouble doing this. Someone building one on some other site (I don’t recall which) replaced it all by soldered brass sheet, which I suppose probably means he was a railway or steam modeller before he discovered that tanks are much cooler things to be building models of. As I myself saw that particular light much earlier in life, I solved it the armour modeller way:

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0.25 mm plastic card, onto which I simply put the resin parts and cut around them with a sharp knife. I then curved them by pressing them around an aluminium knife handle with my fingers, for which you need a much smaller diameter handle than the curve in the parts, because they bend back quite a lot. A bit more fettling later and they fit well enough, the Blu-Tack supporting them in the right position, of course.

The drainage holes in the underside are in different positions than on the Resicast parts, because I took their locations from the pictures of the real BARV I linked to before. The ones in the front plates were made with a round file, because I forgot to add them before bending the parts. Those on the side plates were made with a punch and die before bending, by making a mark where the hole was to go and putting both parts into the die at once, then punching out a half-hole out of both at the same time.

The third plate, at the back, still needs adding but I made a mistake measuring somewhere, so the ones I cut are too low. I’ll add them next time, as I don’t feel like making new ones just now.

This is where your third hand comes into play....

[Guest]

It most definitely would have been good to have one of those, yes … Preferably one with asbestos fingers.

[Guest]

Now the heat in my hobby room is mostly gone again, on to the catwalk!

The instructions say to use a bending tool, and luckily, I have one of those. However, trying it the way the instructions show didn’t exactly work for me … The idea is to put the main part of the catwalk into the tool, leaving the legs sticking out so you can bend them upward. That mostly bent only the legs and not the horizontal bar above them, so I quickly flattened it all out again and tried again on the other side of the bending tool:

[ATTACH]514612[/ATTACH]

That way, I could push it down with the side of the head of a small hammer (from an RP Toolz punch & die set) and get it mostly square. It needed a bit more work to make it, and then bending the legs at the corners, before I could fit them to the hull.

Or so I thought … Trying that showed up an oddity: there are supports “under” the mesh that don’t go all the way to the inner edge, but they do overlap the turret splash guard, so they look like they should sit on top of that. But if you do that, things don’t fit because the catwalk ends up angled inward. What is going on here?

The short form of it is: Resicast made a mistake. On the real vehicle, those supports do go all the way to the inner edge, and there is a longitudinal one there too, not just at the front and rear like the kit parts have them. What’s more, those supports are L- and T-profiles: L along the outer edges, T everywhere else. Out with the plastic strip:

[ATTACH]514613[/ATTACH]

1.5 × 0.25 mm strip to complete the bits under the mesh, and 1 × 0.25 mm for the vertical bits. This is not even half of what needs to be added, but I’m letting the glue on this dry first.

Oh, and I added stuff to the upper part, too:

[ATTACH]514614[/ATTACH]

The kit provides the hand rails, but they seem to have shrunk in casting, so they didn’t fit their locating holes. I drilled those out and made the rails from 1 mm plastic rod.

[Guest]

Catwalks completed:

[ATTACH]514680[/ATTACH]

[Jim R]

Well done with the catwalks. Long, narrow folds are difficult. Shame about Resicast's error although your solution is neat and looks good.

[Guest]

It’s hard to see how they could really have made this much better (other than the too-short supports under the mesh) except by greatly complicating it, though. They would have had to supply most of the bits I added from plastic strip, as etched parts — though they could, of course, have made L-shaped ones and etched grooves into the undersides of the catwalks for them to fit in.

[A_J_Rimmer]

A lovely bit of PE work there Jakko.

[Guest]

Thanks, but they look better than they fit, really

[Guest]

The catwalks are now on:

[ATTACH]514800[/ATTACH]

I also removed the tow bar on the left and shortened it by 14 mm, because it was pointed out to me that the BARV carried two lengths, one for British and the other for American vehicles.

The bumper on the front doesn’t fit:

[ATTACH]514801[/ATTACH]

The reason is that the top of the curve doesn’t fit against the nose, which I solved by sawing a little bit off. Once the glue dries, I’ll have to add some more welds here to fill the gap that resulted.

A bit of thought showed why it doesn’t fit: it’s made for the three-piece transmission cover, and I installed the one-piece version. As you can see here, it fits perfectly well on the three-piece:

[ATTACH]514802[/ATTACH]

This is slightly odd, though, because Resicast tells you to use the one-piece one or, if you have one in your spares box, the three-piece. This suggests to me that the Tasca version of the base kit only had the one-piece version, so it’s odd that the Resicast part is made for the three-piece. The Asuka release has both, though.

[Guest]

Now the little details, the part of construction that always takes me much longer than it should. The BARV has a number of anti-skid ridges, but the conversion set only gives you three for the hull and those aren’t quite correct at that. On the real vehicle it’s a T-profile, welded on on its side, but Resicast provides etched parts that fold into an L-profile. A bit of plastic strip solves that easily enough:

[ATTACH]515011[/ATTACH]

The ones on the hull are simply two bits of strip glued into a T-shape. I made the ones on the superstructure that way too at first, but they didn’t sit right because the slope is less, and that causes the thickness of the strip to throw off the angles. After attempting to put a bevel onto the side of a piece of strip, which failed because you just can’t hold the strip well enough to do that, I took a piece of thin plastic card and bevelled that, then cut a strip from it. I could then, with some effort, glue it to the normal strip to make a T-profile with a bevel on the upright of the T.

Luckily, all of these ridges seem to have varied pretty much per BARV, so as long as they’re in these positions, the exact length isn’t that important.

I filled the holes for the pipe from the bilge pump and the two pieces of rod on the superstructure, then drilled new ones that are more correctly located than the conversion set had them. They’re probably not positioned exactly right, as I estimated it from photos, but it’s better than what it was.

At the bottom of the picture, you can just see that I also added welds to the bumper supports, where I had to cut those away to make them fit the transmission housing.