Churchill Mk. IV AVRE at Westkapelle, ca. 1946

[Guest]

You are all far surer about this model than I am

[tanktrack]

im liking it

[Steve Jones]

Jakko - cant help with answers to your questions but I do enjoy watching your work. Keep it comin mate

[Guest]

With the heat of late, it’s on the back burner … I want to continue working on it, but an attic hobby room isn’t the ideal place to do that right now.

[Guest]

Now the temperature dropped from 36 degrees yesterday to 22 degrees today, I felt like continuing to work on this model. First up, an overview of the model in its basic colours and markings, but with no weathering.

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The tracks are still loose, I only put them on for the photo as I find it easier to paint and weather the model with them off.

The dark paint represents the Bostik waterproofing compound. These tanks were landed on a beach and were equipped with deep-wading trunks, so it’s very likely they would have been waterproofed just as for the Normandy landings; also, in the photo of the real tank at the start of this thread, you can clearly see there are dark lines around some of the bolts behind the air intake, and all around the open engine deck hatch; my conclusion was that this must be Bostik.

I painted the turret stowage bin olive drab (the Vallejo Model Air WWII colour) because in the same photo, it looks very much like the bin is darker than the rest of the turret, but not much different than the ammo box bolted onto the back of the bin. Now, if the tank was SSC 2 brown like I have assumed, and the box dark brown like British ammo boxes usually were, an olive drab stowage bin should be a possibility if it had been replaced for any reason. In any case, it achieves everything I see in the photo of the real tank: a bin that’s darker than the rest of the tank, and of about the same level as the ammo box.

The only markings on the model are the 79th Armoured Division badge (the bull’s head on a yellow triangle), the Arm of Service marking (white 1234 on a blue square, for 6th Assault Regiment, Royal Engineers), the tank’s War Department census number on the hull sides (T69114/B) and a white Allied air-recognition star on the turret roof.

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The division badge and AoS markings are only on the back, because the one photo I have of the front of the tank doesn’t show them. They are clearly visible on the back in all pictures that show that side of the tank, though.

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The markings I used came from the AFV Club kit. The style of the digits in the census number isn’t quite right, if you compare the model to the photo of the real tank in the first post of this thread, but I didn’t have the correct style so I had to cut numbers from the other numbers on the kit’s decal sheet. The /B is hand-painted because the decals only had /C, and so is one of the 1s because I somehow managed to lose the bit of paper with the decal still on it after I had soaked it in water … :thumb2: I also can’t be sure the star should be on the turret, because I’ve not found any photos that show the area well enough, but it’s a fairly safe bet it was on there.

Now then, on to the start of the weathering. This model is going to be unorthodox, I suppose First of all, of course, it’s a brown tank when most people would probably expect it to be green. Then it gets a wash to represent dirt using Tamiya XF-67 Panzer Grey …

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As you can see, the model is now decidedly less brown and more a kind of grey-brown — a bit too much for my liking, actually, but I’ll see about correcting that somewhat later.

Now, some readers may be wondering: a grey wash?! Why not some earth brown colour if the point is to make the tank look dirty?

It’s a question of realism. The real tank stood out in the open for about three years. For the first eleven months of that, it got swamped by the North Sea twice per day, until the gap in the dyke was repaired and the land could be made dry again. My reasoning is that the sea would have carried in sand when the tide came in, depositing it onto (and inside) the tank. When the sea went out again six hours later, my idea is that it would have carried the local soil back out with it, and also deposited that onto the tank. If I go out into the back garden and pick up any random lump of earth, its colour will be somewhere between medium and very dark grey — the former when dry, the latter when wet. My father then confirmed that my memory of the colour of the ground back garden of my grandfather’s house, about 200 meters from where this tank once stood, was correct: the same grey clay.

So I started off with a grey wash, heavily around the wheels, lower hull, inside the front horns behind the idler wheels, and along the top run of the track where it would accumulate and pool. I kept the wash much lighter on the upper surfaces and turret, because of course the dirt would get washed off by the rain again as well, especially in those areas.

Next will be a pale sand-coloured wash, mostly around the running gear and lower hull, to represent the sand that would probably be more at the bottom — because sand particles are much bigger than clay particles, I doubt they would stay all over the tank anywhere near as much. Also, in the photo of the real tank it’s clear there are light-coloured deposits in and around the wheels, some of which is likely river sand rather than sea sand. The heap of sand around the tracks of the real tank, for example, I suspect to be mostly river sand left over from when the road was resurfaces and/or nearby houses were built. (For those unfamiliar with the difference: sea sand is fine and smooth, river sand is coarse and jagged. Sea sand isn’t used for building works because of all the salt in it, so river sand is usually brought in for that even if the beach is literally two steps away.)

[Graeme C.]

Hi Jakko, just been having a catch up on your build, having followed it on the old forum. It's looking good, looking forward to seeing how you weather it, as the real thing was out in the weather & sea for so long.:thumb2:

[Guest]

That’s turning out to be more difficult than it seems, because I find it very hard to imagine what it would have looked like after that kind of exposure. I now have the model fairly dirty and am thinking of how and where to add rust. It won’t be overly rusted, though, because unlike the way many models are painted these days, real tanks don’t rust all that much. I went up to this one¹ yesterday:



and though it’s getting to be badly rusted in some areas,² it’s been sitting out on the top of the dyke being battered by North Sea storms for almost 24 years since it last received any real maintenance. The Churchill wouldn’t have been subject to salt water for anywhere near as long, so rust was probably fairly light still.


¹ That’s one of the Sherman Crabs left in Westkapelle, minus all its Crab fittings. It will be the subject of a later model
² Mainly the wheels. But this fact, according to 1960s newspaper reports about the controversy over this particular tank at the time, means the local council has lost the right to display it. But they don’t even know: I have it on good authority that when the state of the tank was recently pointed out to the mayor by someone from the museum nearby, his reply was, “I thought that tank was yours?”

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Just a great catch up on this build. You're doing a cracking job. Very thoughtful, carefully planned approach is paying dividends. The A3 has turned out well and it was interesting to read how you did it. Like Graeme I shall follow the weathering with interest.
Jim

[Guest]

The A3 marking was the easy part I’ve been washing and drybrushing the model, to arrive at this for now:

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After the first wash of Tamiya German Grey I added one of Lifecolor UA 229 Portland Stone 64, which is a reasonable match for the pale-coloured sand we have around here. This wash I only put onto the suspension, the lower hull, the lower track runs, and the bottom parts of the AVRE attachments, making sure it pooled at the bottoms of the wheels so it looks like sand laying in them.

I also added translucent dark grey paint (like Tamiya X-19 Smoke, but home-made) to the air intake grills, to give them a bit of depth. Once that and the wash were dry, I began drybrushing with a couple of different shades of brown, using positively ancient tins of Humbrol enamels — for proof, here’s a photo:

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That’s MC 24 Natural Wood (not 110!), 29 Dark Earth, 62 Leather, and 72 Khaki Drill. I love it that two of them are non-poisonous — what about the others? While rummaging through my paint drawer for suitable colours, I came across more than a few:

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Five tins of Dark Earth, only two of which are the same vintage! (I only bought the Super Enamel tin new, all the others come from a few batches of old tins I bought, either in new old stock condition or even used. Some of these tins must date back to the 1970s, because I began building models in the early ’80s and the local shop only ever sold Humbrol with the blue stripe on the tins, and perhaps also the “non-poisonous” slogan. But all of these paints still work just fine — Games Workshop, pay attention please! Or maybe they have, of course … Anyway, back to the model.)

I’m not quite happy with the finish yet, though. It looks too clean, yet at the same time the real tank also doesn’t look all that dirty — but dirtier than the model. The difficult bit is working out how to get to something that looks convincingly like the real thing, though.

I also attached the tracks, before I did most of the drybrushing actually. I made both only long enough for the visible parts, as I don’t see the point in building things that nobody will see. To make sure the one on the right stays on, I used some sewing thread:

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Looped through the holes in two of the links on each side, to spread the load a little bit better than if they all go through the same link. I basically just pushed the thread through from the top and pulled it underneath with fine tweezers, then repeated on the other side. It was not possible to tension the thread yet at this point, because that wouldn’t have left any room to get it through, so once I was happy with the number of threads, I pulled the whole lot taut and tied the ends together. Thinking about it now, it would probably be better to make several separate loops instead of looping one length of string multiple times, since with only one break, the track will come loose now.

Anyways, I then rotated the track so the thread is hidden under the mudguard:

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Looks good — or does it?

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If I’d have only used the link at the end, then it would have. Unfortunately, by using the two final links on each side, I put the white thread out in the open on both sides. A little bit of paint solved that, though:

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The left track I put on by letting liquid cement run onto the axle of the drive sprocket and applying superglue to its teeth, then pushing the track onto it and rotating the wheel so the track's free end went out of sight under the mudguard. When that had dried, I did much the same at the front, though the track there is long enough that it goes past the mud chute, because it’s visible through that. Originally I had intended to use thread here as well, but the length made that impractical.

[Guest]

The model is mostly finished by now as far as I’m concerned — but probably not quite 100% yet Here are some more photos of its current state:

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I’ve added sand around the lower track run, the bottoms of many of the wheels and the underside of the hull using some Mig structured paint. I’d never used that before but came across them at a model shop so I thought I’d try one, in this case a pale mud colour that seems a reasonable match for the sand around here. I then drybrushed it with off-white to make the texture stand out a bit (not sure that worked as well as I wanted it to) and to make it appear lighter still.

After that I added some very basic chipping with a dark brown paint meant to replicate rust, then followed it up with a 2B pencil to make small areas look like dull, bare metal. I only did this around hatches and places where it seemed likely, as I don’t believe in all that heavy chipping that has been the rage for the last 15–20 years — if you look closely at photos of these tanks, which as already mentioned, stood outside for three years and in seawater for a year, you barely see any chipped paint or rust anywhere. Having half the paint chipped off a Panzer or a Sherman that’s barely seen a few weeks or months of use just comes across as a bit silly to me … </rant>

Now the question is: what next? I’m not sure I can add all that much to this model anymore, except a figure to show its size/scale.

[prichrd1]

Jakko,

Interesting to see where you'r up to on this, I remember reading part of the original on MM.
Looking good :thumb2::thumb2::thumb2:

I too started modelling in the mid 70's and still have Humbrol paints from that era - still liquid as well :astonished:

Paul.
:smiling2:

[Guest]

In the mid-70s I still played with wooden blocks and fluffy toys I built my first models in the early ‘80s, but I do think I still have some paint tins I bought not much more than a few years later. Regardless, and somewhat amazingly, it’s still good paint!

[Steve Jones]

Well the finishing line is fast approaching. Look forward to seeing any final additions. Its been a great build to follow

[Guest]

To be honest, I think the only thing left to do is add the little girl. Part of me thinks the model needs more weathering, another part looks at photos and thinks, “But what, exactly?”

[Guest]

… and it’s done.