Jakko’s 1:35 Sherman Crab Mk. I — seeing double?

[rtfoe]

You're the man of the hour Jakko...great scratch work. You've got to make the turret half detachable somehow...

Cheers,
Richard

 

[Jakko]

Thanks Keeping the turret detachable would be impractical, though, as I’ve noticed that because of my additions, the upper half of the turret doesn’t sit quite right on the lower anymore without some pressure on it. I’m confident that this will solve itself when I glue them together, but without any pressure on the two halves, you can see light shining through a large horizontal gap at the bottom of the turret bustle In any case I’ve only built things that I expect to be visible through the open hatches (commander’s and driver’s), and with the turret top removable I would need to put much more stuff over on the loader’s side too.

 

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
You're too modest. This research and scratching is truly exceptional.
Jim

 

[Jakko]

Now also with gun elevating mechanism:



This is again mostly plastic rod, card, punched discs, and both sawn-off and stretched sprue, plus the wheel I had originally put onto the traverse mechanism, because it does resemble the elevating handwheel.

Maybe one or two small bits still need to be added, but on the whole, I’m finally pretty much done with the interior:



All three main turret parts:



And some views through the hatch:



On the wall below the commander’s hatch, I added the clips for the torch, plus some hooks and clips that hold the cable to the wall. The view towards the gunner’s controls show how cramped all of this is, which makes me think I still got some dimensions wrong, but it all looks convincing enough.

 

[Strenko J]

Well after missing this thread and now just having read through it ...this is some fantastic attention to detail that is well thought out and extremely methodical In construction .

Keep up the great work Jakko

 

[grumpa]

WOW!

 

[Jakko]

Thanks, guys

 

[Graeme C.]

Impressive work, as ever Jakko.

 

[Jakko]

Thanks I’ve now painted the interior to (almost) my satisfaction, so here are some more pics. First the driver’s compartment:



I didn’t bother much with painting the right-hand side, as the hatch above it will be closed, and therefore focussed on the left instead. The idea is that this is a tank that’s been standing there for a few years with the hatch open, people climbing in occasionally, so there is dirt on the floor, scuff marks everywhere, some rust, tears in the seat, etc.

Turret interior:



Same as above, the weathering is focussed on the areas visible through the open hatch, and of course more underneath that same open hatch than under the roof of the left side of the turret.

With the upper turret half and gun in place, this is what you can see through the open hatch:



All this is basically matt white primer followed by a wash of matt black acrylic (Tamiya XF-1), using water to thin it initially but then switched to isopropanol because the water gave too much surface tension for the detail in the turret. Once that was dry, I heavily drybrushed everything with a couple of different types of white acrylic and then painted the turret drive Tamiya XF-69 NATO Black (actually a very dark grey) followed by another black wash and then drybrushing with a medium grey (Tamiya XF-53 Neutral Grey, I think).

Then I began adding chipped paint with Tamiya X-10 Gun Metal and Army Painter Shining Silver with a very fine brush, using the silver mostly inside the gun metal to create darker edges to the chipped areas. I feel I may have overdone this a little, especially on the gun recoil guard, but I wanted to give the impression of people having climbed into and out of the tank a fair bit. I also drybrushed the floor with both those metallic colours and added washes and neat paint in various earth colours to simulate dirt on the floor. I also used Tamiya Weathering Master sets for some dirt and rust effects, but I still haven’t figured out how to clean the sponge applicator in those (despite having bought them when they first came out, ca. 2006), so I don’t use them much. I also added rust with some Humbrol 62 Leather enamel thinned with some white spirit, using it both to put rust spots in places and streaks down the turret and hull sides.

The seats and holster were painted matt black followed by scratches and tears in two shades of leatherish brown, again applied with a fine brush. A little drybrushing with more NATO Black toned this down a bit, but these are the main things I’m not really satisfied with yet. Oh yeah, and I just remembered I still have to paint the electrical cables and a few other details on the turret drive.

 

[scottie3158]

Jacko, great work

 

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
That looks great.

The idea is that this is a tank that’s been standing there for a few years with the hatch open, people climbing in occasionally, so there is dirt on the floor, scuff marks everywhere, some rust, tears in the seat, etc.

The look you have got fits perfectly.
Jim

 

[Jakko]

Thanks, guys Like I said, a little more work to do, but hopefully we’ll be moving on to the outside again soon …

 

[Jakko]

One more shot of the turret before I closed it up:



I now also painted the cables grey, followed by a coat of Tamiya Smoke and then matt varnish to get rid of the shine the Smoke gave them. The seats I feel I improved markedly by simple adding a transparent brown (actually an acrylic wood stain, mahogany IIRC) over them, then also matt varnish to kill the gloss. This has given them a bit of a richer colour that’s not as painted-looking as what I had before, if you ask me.

Finally, then, we return to grey plastic Here is the Dragon upper hull:



And here it is with some corrections made:



First up, I cut off the front fenders, as these will be replaced by squarish plates, then I filed off the attachment strips for the sand shields along the bottom edge (followed by sanding the whole sides to get rid of the file marks), made a slight undercut to the lower front of the housings around the hatches, removed locating marks from the glacis plate and also removed the little plates at the rear sides of the turret splash guard. Those last ones will be replaced, as they were separate pieces of steel on the real tank but Dragon moulded them on for some reason.

Still to do here is correcting the welds on the glacis plate and around the hull sides, because Dragon has made the classic (probably Tamiya-inspired) mistake of moulding them as big troughs when they should be raised above the surrounding surfaces.

 

[Jakko]

Filling the wrong weld lines plus all the holes for parts I don’t need to add to the Dragon upper hull is more than a little work. Putty applied:



And after sanding and scraping down to the level of the plastic:



I still need to find a good way to make the weld seams, though. I initially thought I could use 0.5 mm plastic rod, but it’s too thick, so I suppose I may have to fall back on stretched sprue instead, or two lines of masking tape with more putty added between them. Not sure yet, this will need a little experimentation, I suppose.

In the mean time, I worked on the hull rears some more:



On the Asuka hull, I added the Resicast wading trunk, though I made the blanking plates myself instead of using the set’s parts that only just fit. It still needs all kinds of detail bits added, but I’m leaving them off for the moment so they won’t get knocked off again just yet

For the Dragon hull, I built the side plates because the kit parts were first of all far too thick — a full millimetre, when the real things are only a little thicker than that:



It’s not quite sheet steel, but comes close, so I made new ones from 0.25 mm card.

The parts also didn’t even fit properly, with the upper rear corner being too far up to align correctly with the lower edge of the rear hull plate. Once I had the side plates in place, I added a blanking plate into the exhaust opening, as this has been done on the monument tank as well. I then corrected the detail on the idler wheel mounts, because Dragon has made the bit with the holts about half as wide as it should be.

 

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Interested to see what method you decide upon for the welds. I have tried melting sprue with glue and texturing worms of Milliput - both dismal failures in my unskilled hands I'm sure you'll get it right and I'll pick up a tip or two
Jim

 

[Jakko]

My normal method for short bits of weld line is to apply a line of filler putty (the kind from a tube) with a pointed sculpting tool, but though that works fine for up to a few centimeters, I don’t exactly feel like doing it for the half a metre or so that’ll be needed on this one. Stretched sprue is probably the way to go, but I haven’t actually tried any method yet.

 

[Jakko]

As is hopefully clear from what I posted in another thread, I’ve settled on using putty. Now I just need to finish the model, but that will have to wait at least until this Parliament song on the radio is over, as listening to that is not conducive to doing fine work on a model

 

[Jakko]

A few shots of the finished weld lines:



I may need to tone some of them down a little still by perhaps scraping a little with a knife, but on the whole I’m quite pleased with the result. Look at the difference it makes compared to the filled-in recessed weld lines you can see underneath them (Note that the little filled weld by the rounded bit of armour on the left in the second photo did not get a raised weld line added, because there was no weld line there on real Shermans. I suspect Dragon took their inspiration from a tank that had been cut in half and re-assembled.)

I also put in the engine decks:



The Asuka kit on the right just has the kit parts, because there is really nothing you can do to improve them much. I still need to add the remains of a deep-wading trunk fitting on the air intake grille at the front, but I can’t work out from the real-life photos of the tank what it looked like.

The Dragon kit was more work, of course. On the real tank, it looks like this:



It’s two steel plates, the front one slightly shorter than the rear, connected with hinges and attached to the tank with a frankly ridiculous number of bolts — which aren’t even the same on the two plates! The front plate has eight bolts per side, the rear one has eleven, and why? Not a clue. All these need to do is be strong enough to support a couple of people standing on top of them occasionally.

Anyway, on the model it’s a piece of 1 mm plastic card to fill the hole for the engine deck, then two pieces of 0.5 mm plate for the hatches on top of that, plus punched hex bolts, copper wire grab handles and hinges from a few bits of 0.25 mm plastic card and 0.5 mm rod. A couple of bolts are missing because they also are on the monument tank, so I drilled 0.5 mm holes there instead.

 

[Jakko]

I’ve been working mostly on the Dragon tank, adding the steel plates and things welded on post-war as well as the remains of the Crab fittings and other corrections needed. Here is the hull rear first:



I drilled out two of the three fuel filler caps, on the right and the one inside the turret ring on the left, because they’re missing on the real thing. This was a little involved, as I didn’t want to risk damaging the model with a big drill, so I first drilled a small pilot hole, then used my biggest “modelling” drill (1.6 mm) and opened up the hole by inserting a round file and turning it like a drill until it fit entirely through the hole — it being about the diameter I needed. Then it was just a matter of a few bits of plastic card for the remains of the hinge and lock.

Note the filled hole on the left, as I had put it into the wrong place first It turns out the Dragon kit isn’t all that accurate in its dimensions: the splash guard around the turret ring is just a bit longer than Asuka’s, and you can tell something is off if you compare them, even when they’re not side by side.

It still needs weld seams added around the little plates.

For the hull front, I reworked the lifting eyes to remove the plate moulded onto them:



The type with the plate occurred on real Shermans, but not on the tank I’m building, so I cut it away as shown in the photo. Of course, after doing this, I discovered plateless lifting eyes on one of the sprues as well Still, I went with these after “all” that work, of course

The remains of the Crab fittings on the front hull side:



For comparison, here’s the real thing:



On the model, it’s all just bits of plastic card and strip, located based on measurements I took off the real tank. I need to redo the small strip at the top: seeing them side by side here shows clearly that it’s too short and in the wrong place I also still need to add the weld seams, and the bolt at the bottom. The right side is identical, except that the big rectangular plate isn’t there. It covers the opening in the hull side through which the Crab’s flail drive passed.

Hull front itself:



I smoothed out the curve of the bow machine gun mount with putty, and though the top should also be less circular, I’m not sure yet how to correct it. The mount itself is just a bit of plastic tube (cut from a kit where it wasn’t necessary); there won’t be a shield on the front of it, though, as that fell off the real tank from rust …

The rail around it is from the Asuka kit, which includes two: one for the tank without additional armour, and one for with. In the real world, the latter was just the former but bent to allow the armour plate under it, so I just bent the Asuka part flat again Dragon included this bit moulded onto the plate, but that didn’t look right to my eyes. I also removed the headlight mounts, as they’re not the right pattern for the M4A4, but haven’t completely rebuilt them here yet — only some discs as the base yet. It also needs grab handles added to the hatches still.

And I’ve also nearly completed the turret:



The putty at the front is because I had to smooth out the sharp ridge around the gunner’s periscope. The commander’s periscope is missing on the monument, which has caused the inside of the tank to have been repurposed — here’s a view straight down:

 

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Cracking work as usual. Weld seams look nice. Difficult to tell if they will need toning down with the putty being white it stands out a lot. The rubbish in the last photo is a disgrace.
Jim