Churchill Mk. IV AVRE at Westkapelle, ca. 1946

Jakko

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This is a repost of a thread I originally started on the Military Modelling forums, so some of you may have seen this already. I’ll recreate the posts I made then, without trying to consolidate them into fewer posts, though with a few small corrections. Hey, at least it’s good for my post count here :smiling3:

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 19/03/2018 19:07:29)

When I bought an AFV Club Churchill Mk. IV AVRE recently, I decided to build it as a tank that was used in the landings at Westkapelle in the Netherlands, on 1 November 1944 — Operation Infatuate II, part of the Allied effort to clear the approaches to Antwerp so the port there could be used.

Looking through photos both in books and online, I first thought of making one with a Small Box Girder bridge, simply because it’s impressive. However, I don’t really have the room for that, so that idea got shelved pretty soon. Buying only the winch and bridge supports seems impossible (Resicast makes a full bridge conversion, but not one with only the fittings actually on the tank), so I looked further.

After a while, I decided to build the model as one of the derelict tanks left behind in the village after the fighting, rather than as one actually in use. Specifically, I settled on this one:

bdca5834-01a6-4f73-7676-3567a151f4ad.jpg

(source: Beeldbank NIMH)

This is tank number T69114/B, belonging to 6th Assault Regiment Royal Engineers, 79th Armoured Division. The photograph was taken in 1946 in the Zuidstraat in Westkapelle. I have a couple more photos of it that show details not visible in this one, but I can’t share them here. Here’s what the same spot looks like today, though from a somewhat different angle (with thanks to Google Maps — click that link to explore for yourself):

796294.jpg


The tank was basically located where the pavement in front of the restaurant is today, though that is actually a new building — the ones visible behind the tank in the 1946 photo having been demolished. The building with the gambrel roof is still there, as you can see, making it easy to locate the exact spot.

As a historical aside, Westkapelle was a tank graveyard after the fighting, and remained so for some years as the village was being reconstructed. T69114/B seems to be the only AVRE that was left actually in the village, but several more stranded on the beach, as this photo shows:

6b40dd53-0419-c93c-05df-f29e4782f4f2.jpg

(source: Beeldbank NIMH)

Yes, that’s two Crabs and three AVREs, and other photos show one more AVRE and a third Crab. Inside the village, if you look at the modern photo, there was a Sherman V (M4A4) left about where the outdoor seating area is beyond the house with the gambrel roof, and a second one diagonally across the street from it. Some distance behind that were three Sherman Crabs, two on the left and one on the right side of the street. And that’s not even mentioning the LVT (4) Buffalos, armoured bulldozers and M29C Weasels left on and around the beach and dunes, or the stranded LCTs. Oh, and the big things in the background of the tanks on the beach are Phoenix caissons, put there after the war to protect the newly constructed dyke (and removed some years later).
 
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Jakko

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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 19/03/2018 19:33:30)

So, onto the model. I’d bought myself AFV Club kit No.35288 Churchill Mk.IV AVRE w/Fascine Carrier Frame, which unfortunately turned out to have the wrong type of track, so I also needed their set No. 35183, Heavy Cast Steel Box Section Spudded Tracks/B.T.S 3 Heavy Built-Up Tracks for Churchill. With those ordered and delivered, I pretty much had what I needed for the model:

796306.jpg


Following the instructions, I started with the sponsons. However, T69114/B had a whole bunch of rods on the side for stowing spare track links, as well as empty bolt holes where the centre sections of the track covers attached. That meant I had to drill a fair number of holes:

796535.jpg


I worked out the distance between the holes and their approximate position using an AFV Club track link, then drilled them with a .5 mm bit. The idea is to insert .4 mm steel wire into them once most of the rest of the model is built (mainly because I don’t want to poke through my skin with that wire all the time when handing the model :smiling3: ). The eagle-eyed may spot I opened up one too many of the holes for the bolt heads on the left hull side; I filled that later, when I realised the mistake.

As for those bolts: pay attention with them if you also build an AFV Club Churchill, because there are actually two styles. One is completely conical (part E30), the other has two flats at the bottom of the cone (part E29). Because they’re side-by-side in the sprue, though, it’s not very obvious that these are actually different parts, so I found I had put on a mixture. Luckily I hadn’t glued them yet when I noticed.

The holes for the bolts for the centre track cover were somewhat difficult to locate correctly. I ended up taking the front and centre covers from the sprue and placing them onto the model, but in the end got them wrong a bit — as I again only found out later, when I actually got round to fitting them on the near-completed hull. To get the position right at this stage, the best way is to glue the rain channels above the doors. The centre track cover has a notch at its front that butts up against the rain channel, so if the latter is in place you can get the position of the cover right quite easily.

Next, the suspension. This looks like it will be a nightmare, with a separate metal spring for each wheel, but luckily if you put the spring around the inner part, you can clamp it to the sponson without any glue:

796301.jpg


Just pull the spring down, hook the plastic part into the sponson, and let the spring go. Everything lines up nicely and you can add the other half of the sponson, then glue it. If you’re careful with the glue, the whole suspension remains movable.

Next, the wheels. I would advise deviating from AFV Club’s instructions and keeping the bit with two wheels separate from the long bit with nine wheels:

796302.jpg


It’ll be much harder to line up correctly if you try gluing the two pieces together before inserting the suspension arms.

As for those: obviously it’s never going to work if you try to line up nine (let alone eleven) arms on one side, then add the other side. I found the best way was to put one arm on without glue, and then the other side strip. Next, I glued the transverse panel that sits between the two sides by that arm, and then hooked in the second wheel arm, glued the second panel, and so on until the end. Doing it this way, I must say I actually found it easier to build this 1:35th scale fully articulated Churchill suspension, than the one on the 1:76th scale Airfix Churchill …

All that remains then is to add the suspension arms to the sponsons:

797404.jpg


This also isn’t as tricky as it seems, if you take a bit of care. I only had to clamp one of the four pieces to the sponson to get everything to sit correctly.

Once the glue had dried I put the wheels on (no pics of that) and once the hull was built, I glued the suspension in place, both inside the sponsons and at the pivots and bottoms of the arms. Putting the model onto a sheet of glass while the glue dried helped ensure everything is level.
 
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Jakko

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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 19/03/2018 19:33:44)

At this point I skipped forward to the turret. As can be seen in the photo of the real tank, the commander’s hatch was open but the loader’s seems to have been closed. Other than the Petard mortar and Best machine gun, though, AFV Club provides no interior for the turret, so I had to scratchbuild something. I based this on the drawings of the interior in the old Tamiya book on the Churchill, as well as on official stowage drawings I found online.

796304.jpg


The plastic sheet on the inside is there to bring the turret wall to more or less scale thickness (the Churchill’s turret side armour was 76 mm thick, the turret shell on the kit is about 1.5 mm, so it needed about half a millimetre more). I then just built some reasonable-looking parts from plastic card, copper wire, and a few bits and pieces from the spares box. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to look good when seen through the commander’s hatch. The following photo isn’t all that great, but it’s kind of hard to take a photo through that little hatch with an iPad :smiling3:

796305.jpg


Because it’s fairly well visible through the hatch, I had built a hand grenade rack from plastic strip, basically by glueing two pieces into an L-shape and giving it six compartments with seven small squares of strip. Of course, after painting the interior I discovered a very good photo of the real thing, showing that what I have is pretty much totally wrong …

Early-type-hand-grenade-stowage-on-Churchill-Tank.jpg

(source: The Churchill Tank Project, via the Wayback Machine)

But I can’t be bothered to change it now :smiling3:

I left out the radio on purpose. There is at least one photo of (presumably British) soldiers stripping parts from tanks in the village late in or shortly after the war, and post-war photos show all the Shermans with no periscopes (big round hole in the commander’s hatch), no antennae, etc. I reasoned that radios would have been taken as well, given their value to a military force. For the same reason I decided to leave out both the tank’s machine guns — I can’t be sure, as I don’t have photos of this Churchill that show the glacis plate, but I would expect them to have been removed either for use elsewhere or for public safety.
 

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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 21/03/2018 18:18:53)

By now I’ve put most of the hull together, except for a number of the detail parts. After putting on the AVRE fittings, I noticed in the photo of the real tank that the pates with the lugs didn’t have bolts in circular surrounds — only the front plates with the curved rail had those.

796812.jpg


Above is with the wrong bolts, below is after I cut them off and replaced them by the plain bolt heads without the bit of tube around them.

796813.jpg


Luckily the mixture of bolt heads on this particular tank means there’s plenty of spares of the smaller ones :smiling3: (Though I only needed one.)

And a few photos of the hull with more of the detail parts on:

796814.jpg


The front driver’s hatch is open in all the photos I’ve seen of this tank, but the rear one is shut. I decided to open the visor and the loader’s hatch slightly, mainly for interest. Same with the rear engine deck hatches: in the photo of the real tank I posted, the right one is all the way open and the left one is partly, but lacking an engine I decided to show them as having been opened and then shut again with the locking thingies (I can’t think of the proper name for these just now :smiling3:) resting on the engine deck, thereby keeping the hatches open a little. I intend to have the bracing struts for them not neatly stowed either.

796815.jpg


One of the square bits around the turret ring went flying off into oblivion the parts graveyard under my workbench, so it had to be replaced with some plastic card. The white bit by the right drive sprocket is the flange that the missing mudguards bolt onto:

796816.jpg


Just a bit of .25 mm plastic card with the shape traced from the mudguard on the opposite side, then trimmed to fit and with .45 mm holes drilled.

The pencilled lines on the transmission deck are the locations of the clasps for the pioneer tools. Since the tools are missing in the tank in the photo (gee, I wonder why, in a village being rebuilt after having almost literally been bombed off the map … ) I’ll need to add the empty clasps, but I haven’t yet found a good photo of what they looked like.
 
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Jakko

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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 23/03/2018 09:58:42)

I’ve added the hooks for keeping the engine deck hatches open:

797077.jpg


Just 0.6 mm copper wire straightened out and given two right-angle bends, as this was easier than cleaning up the very delicate hooks that AFV Club provide.

I’ve also added the stuff on the hull rear plate, which meant building the lower parts of the smoke emitters from scratch, as they’re not just open but empty in most photos of the real tank:

797078.jpg


This was the most annoying part of the build so far. Not only are the lower lids fiddly to build from 0.25 mm plastic card and a bit of 0.5 mm rod, but those etched locking handles are not easy to attach to the kit parts. Since AFV Club already provides for the smoke emitters to be in open or closed position, it would have been so much better if they had provided the lids and the smoke pots separately rather than moulded as one.

Anyway, on to other parts of the model! I found a photograph that shows the front of the tank I’m building on the web site of Stichting Cultuurbehoud Westkapelle (approx. “Foundation for Preservation of Cultural Heritage Westkapelle” ), which has a fair number of pictures of the village during the war, including many of (the aftermath of) the fighting. If you’re interested in that, take this link and click on either “2e Wereldoorlog en verwoesting” or “1940-1950:smiling3:

0441.jpg


(As another historical aside: notice that the tanks seem to be almost on the edge of the village. In fact, they’re in the middle of it, but everything behind the last houses in the photo was destroyed in the Allied bombing, collapsed due to being flooded twice a day for a year, and/or torn down after the war because it was just ruins.)

Anyway, finding this photo meant I finally have some details of the front of the tank, but as it’s not very big I couldn’t really make much out other than the spare track links on the turret and hull front. After e-mailing the foundation, though, and explaining that I’m building a model of that tank, I was sent a higher-resolution scan of this photo that let me see more.

797080.jpg


One of things that made clear is that the tank has the left front track cover on. I had more or less assumed that everything except the last bit had been removed on both sides, but it now turns out that only those on the right were missing. It’s impossible to tell if the middle section was on, but after looking at photos of other AVREs at Westkapelle, my conclusion is that none seem to have landed with the middle section removed but the front section present. I duly added the necessary parts to the model, rejoicing somewhat that this means fewer track links to build (since I don’t particularly like the way the AFV Club heavy tracks go together).

You may also notice I left out the periscope heads. This isn’t because the kit provides them as clear parts that will be fitted after painting, but because I’m working on the assumption that those would have been removed. They were on the Shermans, so why would they have been left on the Churchill?

And the hull front with track links:

797079.jpg


One thing can’t make out, though, is how they were held on. Were there metal rods on the hull front as well, or were these links welded onto the armour plate?

The headlights, incidentally, also won’t receive the clear parts. The photo of the real tank clearly shows there was no glass in them anymore, and incidentally also that I was right in thinking the Besa machine gun (and not, as autocorrect made it in one of my first posts, “Best machine gun” ) had been removed.

Now I just need to find the courage to build those tool brackets …
 
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Jakko

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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 27/03/2018 15:28:15)

After some more work, I’m getting there. I’ve now added most of the details to the hull, built the turret, and added the spare track holders to both hull and turret. Here’s four views of the nearly complete model to start off with.

797909.jpg


797906.jpg


797907.jpg


797908.jpg


The ammo box on the back of the turret is a resin part of unknown origin, given to me by a fellow modeller when I purchased a second-hand Sherman V kit from him (thanks, Eelke!), and the overspray on the turret is because I painted the interior. The putty around the seam is to simulate the moulding marks on the real thing, and to disguise the kit parts’ join, which wasn’t as neat as it could be exactly because of my added interior — the plastic card turret wall I added pushed the upper part of the turret just a little to the left, but enough to be noticeable.

The exhaust and its cover are loose on the model, because I want to be able to paint the pipes separately, and that’s also the reason the spare track links aren’t fitted yet. The driver’s hatch is also missing because I forgot to add it before taking the photos :smiling3:

Here are some close-ups of the spare track holders on the hull and turret:

797910.jpg


797911.jpg


These turned out to be surprisingly quick to add, after the first couple anyway. They’re made from 0.4 mm spring steel wire, which I normally use for antennas because it’ll stand up to bumps without bending or breaking. I held track links up to the model, putting them in the same positions as in the photos of the real tank, then marking out where the holes were to go. Some drilling with an 0.5 mm bit in a pin vice later, I could insert the rods. I simply cut a short length off, dipped the end in superglue, and inserted it into one of the holes. Unfortunately, after taking the photos, I tried putting on the track links and found that I had misjudged the rear vertical pair of rods on the right side of the turret: they’re too close to the horizontal pair behind them, so I can’t put a link on both sets at once. Thus, I had to pull them out again and drill some new holes (which I couldn’t be bothered with just then, so it’s the first item on the agenda :smiling3: ).

Anyway, here’s a shot with links on:

797912.jpg


As I mentioned, they’re not yet glued. I want to paint them separately, then attach them to the model and add the retaining bars over the links as well. Those will be simply plastic strip with two small holes drilled, so easy enough to make.

And a photo at more or less the same angle as the picture of the real tank I posted at the start of this thread:

797913.jpg
 
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Jakko

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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 27/03/2018 15:31:48)

At first I used a ruler to make sure the rods stuck out far enough (5 mm should be about right, I had determined from a track link) but that’s rather laborious, hard to hold to the model, and usually required me to measure and adjust several times before it was right. I therefore built a quick jig: a 5 mm length of plastic H-profile with a bit of plastic card glued to one end. Here’s all the tools needed:

797914.jpg


Just insert the rod so that more than 5 mm sticks out, then use the jig to push it in. You can even use it to make sure the rod is mostly square to the rest of the model.

One lesson I learned, though, is that these Xuron cutters aren’t all the manufacturer’s web site makes them out to be:

797915.jpg


That’s what a basically new pair of cutters looks like after making 37 cuts in 0.4 mm spring steel wire (36 wires for the model, plus one I cut too short). I’m glad I got them for free the other day, rather than having had to pay for them :smiling3: They are good cutters, especially with the extra hinged bit you can see in the first photo, which seems to let them make much squarer cuts in wire than very similar cutters I have without that. Just don’t use them for very hard wire, I suppose.
 
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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 05/04/2018 18:59:07)

By now I’ve assembled the tracks:

799748.jpg


This wasn’t as troublesome as I had expected from the few spare track links I put together earlier, and it’s surprisingly easy to keep them workable. All you need to do is not glue the middle of the link, but put liquid cement sparingly on the sides of the smaller, inside part.

I didn’t make two tracks the same length, because I don’t see the point of putting links together that will only be hidden entirely by the track covers. Instead, I intend to put sewing thread between the two ends of the track and pull it taut around the wheels with that, then turn the tracks to hide the thread under the track covers. (I’ve left the drive sprockets and idler wheels moveable to allow for that.)

Also, the model has been primed. I don’t normally do this, but there’s a fair amount of metal on this model so to prevent the paint flaking off that later on, I decided to give it a coat anyway:

799746.jpg


799747.jpg
 
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(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on >05/04/2018 19:19:55)

Next, preparation for some of the the markings on the real tank. It had the code A3 prominently on the ammo box fixed to the rear of the turret, so I’ll have to make that myself. Since the model is currently white and the A3 was too on the real tank, I decided to do it by masking.

I have a photo of the real tank that shows the marking quite well, but unfortunately it’s skewed — not unexpected in a photograph, of course. Luckily, Photoshop has a perspective crop tool that you can use to trim unwanted bits off an image and straighten it at the same time. You can get at it by holding the mouse button pressed on the crop tool, after which a menu pops out so that you can select the tool you want:

799749.jpg


Then what you do, is click on the four corners of the part you want to cut out and straighten. Naturally, I chose the corners of the ammo box:

799750.jpg


Pressing the Return key or clicking the check mark button in Photoshop’s toolbar crops the image to the bit you selected, and makes it rectangular:

799751.jpg


It’s not the right size, though, so that needs to be tackled next. Since I cropped the image to the size of the ammo box, it was simply a matter of measuring up the ammo box on my model and using its height and width for the image (via the menu Image → Image Size):

799752.jpg


I had to turn the “Constrain Proportions” checkbox off near the bottom of the window, else changing the image’s width also alters its height, and vice-versa, making it unlikely that the image can be gotten to the model box’s dimensions.

Unfortunately, the letters are white on a grey background, and that’s not all that clear. However, by making it negative (menu Image → Adjustments → Invert) and using the Levels tool (menu Image → Adjustments → Levels), I turned the A3 black and made the background much lighter, which improves legibility a lot:

799753.jpg


To make the dark parts of an image darker, you move the little black triangle under the graph to the right; to make the light parts lighter, you move the light grey triangle to the left. (The middle grey triangle adjusts the balance between light and dark; I kept that in the middle because moving it didn’t really make much difference with the fairly extreme amount of lightening I applied.)

Then it’s just a matter of printing it out at 100% size:

799754.jpg


Which results in:

799755.jpg


Then it was off to my hobby room to cut out the A3 with a new, well-pointed knife:

799756.jpg


This isn’t difficult, but a somewhat steady hand helps. If you mess up, just print out another copy and try again (and if you think it’s likely you’ll go wrong, you can print out a few copies of the image on the same piece of paper before you begin cutting at all — saves on paper, time, ink, etc.).

With the characters cut out, I applied a little bit of PVA glue to the backs of both with a cocktail stick and put them onto the model:

799757.jpg


When I get round to spraying the model, they’ll (hopefully) nicely keep those parts of the turret white, and I can pry them off easily because PVA glue doesn’t stick that well to a plastic model. I suspect some touching up may be required, but that’s a lot easier than trying to paint codes like this freehand.
 
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Jakko

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Together with my Sherman V, I also painted the AVRE, since they needed the same colour anyway.

IMG_4444.jpg

For completeness, here’s a shot of the oversprayed stencils on the back of the turret:

IMG_4446.jpg

I’ll leave these on until I finish the main painting of the model, though.
 

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Jakko

Great to see this at the painting stage. Its been great watching the build come together. Any cammo on it in the form of branches or a net??
I used to have a girlfriend called a net:smiling5:
Taxi for Jones!
 

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The model will look like the real tank in the photo at the start of this thread :smiling3:

It is, however, now brown, since earlier tonight. I was doing some more reading on tank colours for my Sherman, and noticed in Mike Starmer’s book on British AFV colours in North-West Europe that, according to the post-war final report about the 79th Armoured Division, all its original vehicles were still painted SCC 2 (brown) at that time too (except for Buffalos which were American OD). So I got to respray it with a new paint mix. Will post pictures tomorrow.
 

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As promised:

IMG_4454.jpg

The model is much browner in real life than it appears on (my) screen, though. I had to look twice to be certain the model I saw on my iPad screen was the one that was actually in front of me — on that it looked like it was painted green, not brown, and when I got the photo to my computer I still had to adjust the colours a bit to make them browner. I still don’t think it looks like the brown on the model, but maybe it does on someone else’s :smiling3:

For comparison, the exhaust pipes are Tamiya XF-64 Red Brown with orange rust effect from Tamiya’s make-up compact weathering set, and the brackets on them are my SCC 15 mixture that the model was originally painted in for the photos above.

I’ve also sprayed the track links, also with XF-64 because looking at the photo at the start of this thread, I decided the (very likely rusted) tracks were not very much darker than the paintwork on the tank, so I picked a paint bottle with a rust colour not too much darker than the model.
 

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I made some more progress, after being forced to take a step back first in order to do so … As I mentioned earlier, I had added lengths of steel rod to the sides of hull and turret to hang the spare track links onto. The plan was to glue the links to the model and then add a piece of plastic strip with holes drilled for the pins to pass through, retaining them much like on the real tank (just without the nuts or whatever go on the ends).

This turned out to be rather more difficult than planned. It needed twelve lengths of strip, and getting the holes right in all of them was turning into such a major job that I gave up on that after about five or six. Since the rods extended past the track links, I also couldn’t just glue the strips to the ends and then add a plastic card disc to the end to represent the nut. After a lot of deliberation, I decided to take the rigorous route:

IMG_4482.jpg

I first pulled the links off the model, which was easy enough because I’d superglued them to it, so putting a knife blade between link and turret, then twisting just popped the paint off the link or the turret and got the link free.

I then put yet more notches into the blades of the damaged cutters I also showed above, by snipping about a millimetre off each of the rods that was to hold links (I left the others alone). To do this right, I needed to hold the model on its side, at eye level, and the cutters horizontal — due to the extra swivelling bit, they only just square in that orientation, it seems. This was a bit fiddly, but not that difficult.

After that I put the links back onto the turret, painted the insides of the plastic strip I’d cut, and once that was dry, glued them to the links with superglue:

IMG_4484.jpg

That just left the nuts to add, which I made by punching 0.65 mm discs from 0.25 mm plastic card:

IMG_4486.jpg

Finally, when the glue had dried, I painted the outsides of the strips as well. Now I need to start weathering this model, but I’m still undecided how to do that best so that it replicates the photo at the very top of this thread. For one thing, I’m very puzzled about the dark line running along the side of the turret. For another, I’m wondering if the stowage bin on the back of the turret might be SSC 15 olive drab, if the rest of the tank is SCC 2 brown — it certainly looks darker than the rest of the tank, but not than the ammo box fixed to it.
 

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Great to catch up with this build. It is going to be a cracker when finished

Peter
 

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You are all far surer about this model than I am :smiling3:
 

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

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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.
 

Jakko

Way past the mad part
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Jakko
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 :smiling3: 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.)
 
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