Sherman V at Westkapelle, ca. 1947

Jakko

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Finally, the engine is painted and installed.

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That’s obviously the engine. I used some photos of restored engines I found online as a painting guide, as I couldn’t find any good information on what it would have been painted like when new. Basically, the engine blocks are green, the radiator and piping for coolant and intake air are black, and all the exhaust pipes I painted as if they’re rusted. Additional weathering and wear was then added to the engine as a whole.

Here’s the engine bay it will go into:

IMG_2768.jpg

I removed the engine support at the rear because it interfered with the engine’s fit and turned out to not be visible anyway with the engine in place. Inside the middle of the three depressions in the floor, I put a piece of 1.5 mm plastic card so I had a surface to glue the engine to.

IMG_2778.jpg

Now with the engine and firewall glued in place. As I couldn’t reach underneath it, I put a fair amount of superglue onto the plastic card from the previous photo, wiggled the engine into place (which is harder than you think it might be), and trial-fitted the upper hull to make sure it was in the right place. Once I was happy with its fit, I added more superglue underneath the radiator, as that touches the floor but its front side will be invisible anyway. Then the firewall, and finally I decided to put a brace in so the engine can’t come forward even if the glue doesn’t hold it for some reason. This is just a piece of resin sprue of the right width that I glued diagonally to the firewall.

Then came Asuka’s exhaust pipes and ducting. This fits well enough, except that the plastic exhaust pipes neither fit nor line up with the Resicast ones on the engine. I had to cut them down to get to this:

IMG_2780.jpg

To ensure it would all fit and line up, I drilled a hole into the plastic exhaust pipes and added a short bit of 1 mm brass rod, which fits inside the holes in the resin exhaust pipes. That just left the gap between the resin and plastic pipes, which I solved by adding a tube around the resin pipes from a strip of 0.15 mm plastic card:

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Once the plastic parts were also fully painted and installed on the model, it looks good enough for my standards:

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Now I can at last get on with the rest of the model …
 
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Steve Jones

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Jakko
Outstanding work on the engine and compartment. It took a lot of work but was worth it in the end. Where did you put the oily rag?:smiling2:
Steve
 

Jakko

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It’s covered in resin dust so I decided to leave it off :smiling3:
 

Jim R

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Hi Jakko
Great progress and some real off innovative solutions to problems. Interior and the engine look good.
Jim
 

Jakko

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innovative solutions to problems
I suppose you’re talking about the printed-out ammo rack, but that’s really just trompe-l’œil done the easy way, on a computer :smiling3:
 

MikeC

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Jakko,
Caught up on your build, there is a lot of great work there.
Cheers,
MikeC.
 
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Brad9826

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Jakko, great work and explanation on your way of doing your build.
:thumb2:
 
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Evan James

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This is looking incredible Jakko, The interior details have come up great, I'm looking forward to seeing this come together.
ev
 

Jakko

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Thanks all, but I’m really just a mediocre modeller of no more than average skill :smiling3:

Now, though, I’ve added the deep-wading trunk to the back of the model:

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This is by Resicast, and goes together easily enough except for the fact that they had forgotten to pack the two exhaust cover plates, so I had to make them from plastic card (as you can tell by the R written on the visible one) with some punched-out bolt heads. I have another set of this (for a Sherman Crab I intend to build later, also as a post-war derelict vehicle), so that allowed me to get the measurements for them, but even without it would have been easy enough as they’re just plates that close the holes to either side of the wading trunk, with three bolts on each.

Not that much fun were the handles on the removable lower plate. Resicast gives you two sprues of five handles each, for the six that need to go onto the model. Three were already broken, but that ought to have given me enough … but no, of course more broke so that I had to glue the handle back onto one to get the six I needed :unamused:

The set also includes a forward engine deck plate (two, actually, one for a Tasca/Asuka kit and one for Dragon), with waterproofing canvas over the grille and an etched mesh to go on top of that. However, as is visible in the upper picture, I used the plastic engine deck from my Asuka Sherman because on photos of the real tanks, all the canvas has disappeared from the gun mantlet and bow machine gun, so I don’t think any would have been left on the engine deck either. For the same reason, I now have two spare canvas-covered gun mantlets (M34 and M34A1), a ditto a bow machine gun, plus a 75 mm barrel — times three! (Two each from the wading trunk sets, plus one more of each from the Resicast Crab conversion, from which I also won’t use them.)
 

Jakko

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I’m getting there: by now I’ve added the tool stowage and other details to the rear hull. For completeness, I should probably mention I’ve decided to build the other Sherman V than the one I originally intended to, because more views of different sides of it exist. That’s to say, this one:

Zuidstraat - Sherman %225 Bramble%22 4.jpg

As was to be expected, this tank was missing all its tools:

Zuidstraat - Sherman %225 Bramble%22 3.jpg

So I had to scratchbuild the tool stowage brackets:

IMG_2823.jpg

This turned out to be fairly easy with some more leftover photoetched frets and a few photos of real Sherman tool stowage. I first had to fill the holes for the kit’s tools, because many would remain visible underneath the brackets. Then it was mostly a matter of cutting a bit of brass from the fret and bending it into shape. The white bits of plastic strip represent the fire extinguisher brackets.

Other details you may notice are the missing tail light lenses. As this photo shows:

Zuidstraat - Sherman %225 Bramble%22 2.jpg

those were stolen or vandalised (I suspect they were removed to take the bulbs out for use elsewhere), so I drilled a hole in the middle of both lamps and them reamed them out with a knife, followed by a drop of liquid cement to smooth the plastic. This photo also seems to show the left rear light guard was missing for some unknown reason, so I left it off.

Other details: the right fuel cap cover is open, since the side and rear views above show it that way, and the keen-eyed may notice I left off the little sloping armour plate on the turret splash ring, just in front of the fuel filler cap. This because the side view of the real tank doesn’t show it either. Instead, I drilled a small drain hole through the splash guard.

Now I need to find good way of making the stowage rack on the hull front. I’m thinking of soldering together brass L-profile — if I can find or make some fine enough and I don’t screw up the soldering :smiling3:
 

Steve Jones

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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
 

Jakko

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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

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

MikeC

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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.
 

Jakko

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The Churchill is waiting for paint :smiling3: 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.
 

Jakko

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And now the progress I wanted to make on the Sherman :smiling3: 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:

IMG_4342.jpg

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 @MikeC 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.
 

Jakko

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*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:

IMG_4358.jpg

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.
 

Jakko

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

IMG_4448.jpg

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:

Zuidstraat - Sherman %22Wolf of Badenoch%22 (%225 Bramble%22) 6.jpg

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.)
 

Jakko

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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

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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:
 
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