¹⁄35

Tasca Sherman Firefly VC

Introduction

When I opened the Tasca 1/35 Sherman Firefly kit I was eager to get a look at this much anticipated (and hyped) release. A quick sort through sprues and instructions, and things were looking good. The mouldings were excellent and showed a lot of attention to detail. On the Hull the weld seams were, like the recent Dragon Shermies, subtle and raised (no time wasted filling weld seams on this kit!). Something else that was new to me in this kit, and that I was looking forward to playing with, was Tasca’s “working” VVSS suspension.

The first decision is which version of the Firefly VC to make from the kit options. I picked the Kiwi tank based in Italy in the last days of World War Two. As this was a very late War tank, the idea came to me that I could depict a tank and crew after the end of hostilities. Almost all my builds of the previous year had been of combat situations or knocked out vehicles. This was a chance to show a relaxed crew heading for de-mobilisation, having survived the War, job done. I didn’t want a large scale diorama just a small vignette, to show off the Firefly and to put over the story. As I also wanted to show off the movable suspension the first thought was to have the Sherman climbing a bank or coming out of a ditch. While pondering this I visited a model show, at which I bought some of Vallejo’s water effects. With that came the final idea for the scenario, a Tank emerging up a river bank, time to start work. At that time (April 2007) I never imagined it would take such a long time to get to the stage where I could happily say it was finished.