Israeli M-51 Sherman, ca. 1965

Jakko

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I don’t know how long ago, but probably almost 20 years, I bought and built the Dragon kit of an Israeli M-51 Sherman (popularly, but erroneously, known as the “Isherman” or “Super Sherman”), but never did finish it. As it’s been so long, I don’t recall my reasons for that, but looking in the box recently, I think it’s because I didn’t particularly feel like building the tracks for it. I had bought the AFV Club set of T80 tracks, which I took out of the box a few months ago with the intention of putting them on a Sherman I have almost finished by now. Because that tank needed a different pattern of tracks after all, I instead decided to use them on yet another Sherman last week, but very much discarded that plan soon after I started assembling them. In any case, I still have the original tracks and will probably be putting them onto the model soon, so this one will finally get finished because of my current interest in Shermans :smiling3: (Also, the reason I’m posting this instead of actually working on any of these models is because it is very difficult to put on small parts if you have a sticky plaster on the index finger of your dominant hand … Work will resume once that’s off :smiling3:)

Before I do that, though, some photos of the model as it sat in its box for the better part of two decades …

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As you can see, it’s not entirely Dragon. The upper hull and some of its detail parts are actually from the old Italeri M4A1 kit, for the reason the following photo illustrates:

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I placed the Dragon hull that came with the M-51 kit onto the Italeri hull here, to show the difference in texture. The kit part is far too rough, which I seem to recall is because Dragon used as their example, a museum tank that had been painted too many times without removing the old paint first. Real Sherman castings were fairly smooth, so the Italeri hull was a far better representation (I also scraped down the texture on the turret). Because the Dragon Sherman kits all trace their lineage back to the Italeri kit, this was a simple substitution that looks like it required no modification to the Dragon lower hull at all. I’m not sure anymore why I had that hull. Could be I bought the Italeri kit specifically for this, but I haven’t got a clue what I did with the rest of it.

The main work needed was to cut out the Italeri engine deck and put the Dragon one (that was a separate part) in its place, as well as extending the rear hull plate with some plastic card and filling a gap between the front mudguards and the hull in a similar way. The following photos show better what needed to be done:

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The periscope in the driver’s hatch is from the old and very useful Verlinden set, and I replaced many grab handles with copper wire, but that’s about it.

The only change needed to the turret was to add some blocks so it fits the Italeri turret ring:

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Jakko

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Looking at the model, I felt the light guards were a bit thick, being the original Italeri parts. Luckily I have plenty of spares from Asuka kits, which usually have both plastic and etched parts, and the former are much finer than Italeri’s from the 1970s. Cutting off the old ones front and rear and replacing them was a quick enough job:

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The tracks are not that quick and easy. By now I’ve got the guide horns on the links on one sprue, of four:

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They need to be cut free (you can see the part of the sprue they were in on the right side of the photo) and glued to the centres of the links. Some need a little cleaning, which I’ll do after the glue has dried, as that will be far easier than trying to clean these bits before glueing them down.
 

Jim R

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Well Jakko, even 20 years ago, when you were just a youngster, you still had skill and imagination. Definitely a build that deserves to be finished.
Good idea to glue the guide horns now.
Jim
 

Jakko

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Thanks. However, though I may not be as ancient as some people here, I wouldn’t really call my 20-year-younger self a youngster :smiling3: I was in my mid-20s at the time, and been building models for over 15 years then. If anything, I don’t think my skills have really gotten much better since then.
 

Jakko

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Against my usual practice, I glued the suspension bogies and return rollers to the hull before painting; the wheels will follow later, before the track goes on. I also filled the seam around the turret, which for some reason I had not done back when I actually built this model:

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Jakko

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Argh! Spot the mistake:

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When I was glueing the guide horns to the track links, I noticed I had already done half of a sprue, so one-eighth of all the links in the kit, way back when. Those are the ones on the right in the photo. The other seven eighths I did like the ones on the left …

So I can now remove the horns again from 143 links (I lost one, also visible in the photo) and put them back in the correct place …

Edit: nope :sad: They don’t seem to want to come off without breaking. Not sure what to do next, but chances are this will go back into its box for another twenty years or so.
 
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