Sherman V at Westkapelle, ca. 1947

[Steve Jones]

Jakko

Great research!! It's nice to make the model as accurate as possible. The changes are certainly going to make it a unique build

Steve

[Guest]

Thanks. I’m trying to do them justice — these tanks stood a few minutes’ walk from where my grandfather used to live in the ’80s, so I suppose it’s a bit of personal interest even if I never saw them in the flesh.

By now I’ve bought some L-profile brass and plastic, so someday soon I hope to be able to post pictures of the finished stowage rack, bent and battered and all.

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Steve is right - unique and personal model. Research can be fun and a bit addictive. Work so far is excellent :thumb2:
JIm

[Guest]

Jakko,
I lost track of your build since the big changeover, but it is good to see it is still in progress. How is the Churchill doing?
Cheers,
MikeC.

[Guest]

The Churchill is waiting for paint I intend to finish building this one first so I can spray both at the same time. The main thing holding this up is that I need to build the stowage rack on the front, and that has hit a few snags, while I’ve also been busy with other things so I haven’t actually worked on the Sherman much lately.

[Guest]

And now the progress I wanted to make on the Sherman As I think I mentioned above, I wanted to make the stowage rack on the hull front from brass, so I could bend it into shape, as the one on the real tank got twisted somehow.

First, the pieces of brass I made:

[ATTACH]303752[/ATTACH]

I bought a length of ±1 mm angle profile brass, and filed notches in it to bend it into a rectangle of 45 mm × 12 mm. This worked fairly well, except I had either measured or filed wrong, so the short bit at the end was too short. I took it off and made a new piece to go between the open ends, then also cut a piece of 0.15 mm brass sheet to the size of the plate that sits on the outside of the rack. Strangely, on the real tank this was lower than the outside of the rack, so I made it 45 mm × 8 mm, which looked right. The two braces to go between the long sides are bits of etched brass fret cut to length.

After that, I tinned all the bits to be soldered, after applying flux to them, then with a soldering iron, first soldered the bent corners for strength, then added the short bit, followed by the two braces, and finally the plate. It ended up not quite Guest standard, but given that if this isn’t the first thing thing I soldered this decade, it’s probably no more than the third. The main thing I had been worried about, was bits popping loose as I added other parts, but this turned out to be an unfounded fear. Only one thing came loose — a corner of the short bit of angle profile — because I had to un- and re-solder the plate that attaches to it a few times before it sat right, but even then I managed to get the corner back together the way it was supposed to.

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And here’s it sitting on the front of the tank:

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You can’t see in this photo that it’s also bent much like the one on the real tank was. It’s not yet glued down because I want to prime and paint the inside of it first, as it may not be accessible that well anymore after glueing it on.

The other brass on the front of the tank comes with the kit, while the white bits are replacements for the spare track brackets. On the real thing, as can be seen in one of the photos above, the track links were removed by (if you study the photo carefully) unbolting the lower end of the retaining bar only, so that the bar hang down onto the tank now. I first tried cutting the bar off the Asuka parts, but one of the pieces I needed to keep, snapped in two and part of it went flying, never to be seen again. I therefore just built replacement brackets from bits of plastic strip, as they're not exactly complicated parts. The piece of rod is a spare wheel holder, which I glued into a hole I drilled in the glacis plate.

The antenna mount comes from the roof of a Meng A-34 Tortoise, and though it’s somewhat oversize for the Sherman, I didn’t have any other I could use, so it will have to suffice.

Next hurdle: empty periscope mounts for the drivers’ hatches. I thought I had some in etched brass, but unfortunately not, so I’ll have to find a way to scratchbuild them.

[Guest]

*phew* I’m finally done building this model (except for the tracks, that is).

Here’s some all-round views of it:

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The turret was loose when I took these photos, but I put it in the position I’ll glue it down in once the model is painted.

I had to build a new engine deck from plastic sheet because the one in the kit is too thick: the edges are fine, but the middle bit is much thicker than the rest, which isn’t a problem if you glue it shut but it’s rather visible when it’s open, as it will be on this model.

The rear mudguards are aluminium sheet, bent to shape and then bent so it’s battered like in the photos of the real tank. I used the kit’s sand guards as a guide, since I figure these were probably part of that set-up on the real tank, even if there are no rails on it to attach the rest of them.

Close-up of the drivers’ hatches:

[ATTACH]303964[/ATTACH]

The periscope holders are plastic card and strip, just simple rectangular boxes with a slot cut in one side for the knob that secures the periscope.

Once I’d added them, I noticed that the hatches on the real tank were different than those in the Asuka kit: the plastic parts have the locking hooks that secure the hatches in the open position, while the real thing had a sheet metal rest instead. So that meant cutting off the hooks and the nodules on the hull top that they would lock into, then adding the necessary brackets and things to hatches and hull from plastic card and aluminium. The Shadock’s Sherman Minutia Website proved very handy for this.

[Guest]

A month on, and I finally got round to spraying the model.

[ATTACH]307181[/ATTACH]

The colour is my take on SCC 15 olive drab, mixed per this post on the Britmodeller forum: five parts Tamiya XF-81 Dark Green 2 (RAF) plus one part each of XF-58 Olive Green and XF-71 Cockpit Green (IJN). However, I must say I could barely see the difference between straight XF-81 and this mixture after I’d made it. Maybe it dries differently, though — I haven’t yet compared that.

Now on to figuring out how to replicate the weathering on the real tank, not to mention the markings and the smeared-out paint on the hull side.

Talking of which, I found a very illuminating photo of the real tank a little while ago:

[ATTACH]307182[/ATTACH]

This is the first one I’ve seen on which a name is visible — on all the others it seems like the hull sides were pretty much devoid of markings, other than the painted-out (?) serial number. However, this one has a name that, due to the brush-cleaning someone did on the tank, caused me some trouble deciphering it, most likely because I’m not Scottish. It turns out the tank’s name is WOLF OF BADENOCH. I misread the first word as most likely being “VALE” initially, and couldn’t make out the first two letters of “BADENOCH” well either. Only when I realised what the first word actually said, did Google supply “Did you mean Wolf of Badenoch?” (For those of us who aren’t Scottish either, it’s a reference to one Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, 1343 – 1405.)

[Guest]

I must say I could barely see the difference between straight XF-81 and this mixture after I’d made it. Maybe it dries differently, though — I haven’t yet compared that.

I’ll have to revise that: straight XF-81 is darker and less green, it turned out when I brush-painted some onto the hull floor and waited for it to dry. This is good news for me, since the tank has a number of darker areas, which I can probably use XF-81 for.

However, thinking about it, I now suspect those to be American olive drab — the additional armour, for example, seems darker than the rest of the tank, as do the inside of the opened engine deck and the whole of the wading trunk. This makes me think that the tank was probably repainted when the British fittings on the hull front and rear were added, and the extra armour plate added later, and it’s unlikely that the inside of the engine deck would have received a coat of SCC 15 if it was already in OD. I might have to do a bit more research to find out when the appliqué armour was fitted to British Shermans …

[Steve Jones]

I hope you get the answers you want on the colours. A bit of a minefield but I am sure it will work out okay:thumb2:

[Guest]

I still don’t have any definitive answers, as I doubt anyone will ever really know, but after much deliberation and trying to read up on this (harder than it looks, as most things written about it seem to be by people making assumptions and wild-arsed guesses), I decided that faded OD would be the most likely colour for the whole tank, with British addons in SCC 15. As for the AVRE, that means I got to spray it again, and I’ll post pics of it tomorrow.

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Looks great under a coat of paint. Your painstaking detail does you credit and this is a real personal, unique model.
Jim

[Guest]

It didn’t look that great up close, my airbrush spattered a bit. And here it is in its new coat of somewhat lightened American OD:

[ATTACH]307518[/ATTACH]

I sprayed the undersides with Vallejo Model Air 043 Olive Drab straight from the bottle (“OK for wartime OD,” according to Zaloga), then lightened it a bit with Tamiya XF-60 Dark Yellow for the upper surfaces. Unfortunately, I forgot to paint the outside of the engine deck, even though I did paint its inside You can tell it’s greener than the rest of the tank in the photo. But that does allow me to post a photo of the difference in colours between the first attempt and this new one:

[ATTACH]307519[/ATTACH]

I’ll just brush-paint this side in the new colour later.

Also, a tale of how modelling is a difficult hobby. Aside from spraying this model in a room in which it was 30 degrees, my airbrush decided to quit when I was about two-thirds done with this model (luckily I had already finished the Churchill). Suddenly, no paint came out, which isn’t a rare problem, but all the usual remedies failed: pulling the trigger back and forth, increasing the air pressure, trying to put clean water through, removing the nozzle — none of it worked. The best I managed to do was either blow air into the water, or blow bubbles through the nozzle. So I tried a few other nozzles (I use an Aztek A470) and also didn’t get any paint out of them. Then I noticed that the needle seemed to be stuck forward, even if I pulled back the trigger.

With the nozzle out and looking into the airbrush, it looked like there was quite some paint build-up around the front end of the rod that the trigger works on, and which the needle sits against. In an Aztek, the needle is part of the nozzle and has a spring of its own inside that. Screw the nozzle into an airbrush, and the operating rod pushes the needle forward against its spring; pulling the trigger back pulls the rod to the rear too, and that then allows the spring to push the needle back. In other words: paint build-up there could block the needle’s rearward movement, which isn’t exactly the first thing I think of when my airbrush stops working — paint clogging the nozzle is more likely, after all. Luckily, the Aztek’s disassembly/cleaning tool has a scraper for precisely this area, so a quick turn with that and the brush worked fine again. *phew*

[TIM FORSTER]

Jakko, I have just caught up with this fascinating build after first seeing it on the MM site many moons ago.

Always good to see an unusual subject - but especially with this attention to detail.

Can't wait to see the diorama take shape.

I will continue to watch with interest.

Tim

[Guest]

A picture is worth a thousand words:

[ATTACH]308106[/ATTACH]

Especially if you add a little calculation.

• AFV Club set 35038, M4 Sherman VVSS T48-Track, contains six sprues; it must follow from this that for each side of the tank, three sprues should suffice.
• Each sprue contains 28 links (plus 56 end connectors and 28 end connector extensions, which I didn’t use).
• 3 × 28 = 84.

Then why, AFV Club, do I end up with a gap of about 1.5 cm in the track if I put it on my model after having used all the links in three sprues?! 1.5 cm is four links, my ruler tells me, so I’m eight links short for the whole tank.

The weird thing is that this is exactly the amount the M4A4 (and M4A6) required beyond the number needed on other Shermans, due to their longer hull, which must mean that if you build an M4, M4A1, M4A2 or M4A3, AFV Club provides exactly enough links for two tracks, with none to spare. My conclusions are that 1) the links in the set are too short, and 2) AFV Club prints the number of links used on the real tank rather than the number of links needed from their sets.

To be honest, knowing the above, I would expect there to be seven sprues in each set, as that gives plenty of links and a bunch of spares to put onto a model. Apparently, AFV Club feels differently about this, but I also suspect they never tried putting them on an M4A4.

Worst of all, I discover this after having had the great joy of building a (nearly) full track … First of all you have to file an ejector mark off the inner face of every link. Then you need to clean off the sprue attachment point on each and every end connector. After that, you discover that the track pins aren’t all the same thickness, so on some links the end connectors are firmly attached while on some, they come off if you breathe on them, and on yet others they stay on, but only just, so don’t handle the track too much. That in turn means you can’t build a whole length of track, paint it, and then wrap it around the wheels — you need to glue it before all that. (Painting them while on the sprue also isn’t really an option because it looks like you’ll be spending as much time touching up as it took to paint them in the first place. Still, this is probably to be recommended anyway since it will thicken up the pins and so keep the connectors on. I think I’ll try this for the other side.)

Now, I have a second set of these tracks so I can raid that for the eight links I need, but then what do I do with the rest? I really don’t feel like putting together another set of these tracks for the second Sherman I intend to build (which is why I have the other set in the first place), but if I take eight links from it I won’t have enough for that model anyway — and I’m also not likely to find many buyers for it second-hand with eight links missing … *sigh*