On to the gun (not that any of the previous is finished yet, of course
). This is very nicely done, but I have an Aber aluminium barrel that I felt looks better than the plastic one in the kit. Don’t get me wrong: the kit barrel is certainly acceptable, and even includes the rifling, as does the Aber one:
One oddity about the gun is that it has a separate breech block that can be positioned open or closed, but there is no opening for the cartridge to go into with the block open … I glued the gun halves together and when dry, clamped them in a modeller’s vise so I could drill through from the barrel end with a 3 mm bit. This is easy, because the barrel is hollow and only the chamber end is solid. After cleaning up the mess left when the drill broke through (before I glued in the breech block), I have a satisfactory chamber opening:
Now for that Aber barrel. I compared it to the kit one and found it was about 6 mm longer …
Luckily,
Sherman by R.P. Hunnicutt includes the overall length of the 75 mm gun M2, which in 1:35 scale turns out to be 66.6 mm. As you can see above, the kit gun is the correct length — the gap between rear end and barrel is accounted for by the thickness of the gun shield, that sits between the two. I suspect the Aber barrel is intended for the old
Tamiya or the less-old Academy M3 kit, that probably has a recess for the barrel.
This, of course means I had three options: saw off the barrel, turn down its rear end, or cut down the internal part of the gun. I discarded the first because I don’t trust myself to make a square cut on a tapered barrel, and the second because that same taper means the barrel is hard to get into a lathe.
So, I took 6 mm off the front of the gun. Rather than try to go around it, I just cut through the bottom recoil cylinder because its front end sits entirely out of sight inside the gun shield. The top one, though, is where the shield attached to the gun so cutting that is not really an option.
The barrel has a 2 mm diameter extension, but the gun’s internal diameter is about 3 mm, so I cut some bits of 1 by 0.5 mm strip and glued them inside. I also drilled through the gun shield and opened it up to the full size of the recess that the kit barrel would have glued into:
And here’s what it looks like with all three pieces together: