Some fantastic work in here. Well I started my Airfix Crusader last night.

I will post some shots once photobucket is out of maintenance window

We will see, if I can find time to seal the decals on tomorrow, I might get the weathering done in time, but it would be very close. I beleive I will be bringing a couple though.

Howdy all.

Some nice work going on here.

I'm still in the assembly phase, going a bit slow.

Got some work done on the turret, fitting it altogether has been a bit fiddly, getting everything to line up for the sides. Had to do a bit of sanding and thinning on the inner edges.

then I had to clean up some fingerprints off the sides, it seems no matter how careful you are, you always get your fingers in the glue.. LOL



Delbert

With Photobucket back up, here is some progress photos.

good job guys!

Heaps of progress last night, while wife was feeling sick, and in bed.

Brad that was a ton of progress. The wife must have been on some good knock out meds

Yep, she went to bed at 7pm, and woke up at 9am this morning. I was modeling until 2am

My wife went to bed early too...

I got the decals on and a gloss coat over them ..A Black pin wash was added to the recesses.. So this is where I'm at today ..Planning a flat coat and then some filters next..





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I'll be adding to great Alpine figures which were painted by my good friend Denis Allaire..






Rick

Richard,

That Church is looking great! The figures are pretty awesome too. Your friend does a great job.

And wife going to bed early really seems to help the modelling progress, doesn't it?

Nice work Richard and tell your friend the figures look great.

Now for my M7. My apologies for the blurriness. They didn't look bad on the camera. I'll have to do a better job on that as I start adding equipment and (possibly) crew. Anyway, I added the green and red-brown to the Priest.

Richard, tell your friend Denis he paints awesome figures!

shall do !

It's been several months since I've had any bench time (5 maybe) and I think I have a big enough window to hopefully finish a model here from a to z. so here is what I have in mind and hopefully it qualifies for the campaign. The caption in Steve Zaloga's "Armored Thunderbolt" book page 181 describes this as a British Firefly knocked out in the Netherlands during operation Market Garden.

by combining the following two kits I get the my rare firefly IC DV and I still get a real nice M4 left over to make at another time.

I didn't see anything in the instructions against wrecks so I'm going to proceed here. Let me know if this is okay. I have developed a sick fascination with wrecks (mostly shermans) over the last 2-3 years and I like to base my models on a vintage photo. Earlier this year I built one for the Sherman Only Campaign.

I probably need counseling but I just really enjoy these subjects for some reason.

I ran into a couple of small problems with my knocked out firefly IC welded kitbash. I have some updates with some explanations on the photos. For some strange reason the Welded IC turret and the Hybrid IC turret are moulded differently in the rear right corner of the turret. I realize that the hybrid turret doesn't have the pistol port but they should otherwise be the same. The Welded IC kit top portion of the turret does not fit flush with the lower half and some work has to be done to get a proper fit. The top and bottom on the Hybrid fit perfect so I don't understand why the guy that was tasked with adding the pistol port for this mold messed with the rear right portion of the turret. Anyways, here is how I fixed the problem using the Hybrid turret as a model. I also learned that the mantlet is flush to the gun mount on the right side but not on the left, I went looking at photos and this particular detail is supported in part by the pics I have in collection. Apparently there are at least two types of 17 pounder mantlets used on fireflies. just never realized this detail before. Kudos to DML for getting this detail right on this kit.

Before:


After:

I also modified the front edge shape of the FDA using the old Italeri as an example.

Then I started making the typical mods required on DML lower hulls to get a proper fit with the FDA and the upper hull.

Here are a couple more photos with a set of new problems that I discovered after I had already glued the gun tube and gun shield in place. The barrel looked short to me so I measured it and it came in at about 4.5mm short from the edge of the mantlet to where the MB starts. The proper measurement is supposed to be 88.2mm. If you stick the gun tube all the way aft into the gun mount piece it will be short. Thankfully I found a very easy and quick fix to this. By placing a plastic tab at the base of the gun tube mount, it keeps the tube from sliding all the way back and it measures out to a 88mm just a fifth of a mm short but much better than before. After my mods the barrel scales out to less than a 3/4 of an inch shorter in the real deal. Had I left it unmodified it would have been about a foot shorter than the real one!


The tub now fits so well to the upper hull I don't even have to use rubber bands to hold them together. also I had to trim less than 1 mm from the back of the sponson floor extensions to get the front upper hull to mate cleanly to the FDA and the FDA sides to the sides of the lower hull.


Mike Canaday on ML told me that I should modify the antenna pot to make it into BLW M4 DV. He believes that most of the welded hull firefly IC were Baldwin M4s, but I'm considering leaving the PSC pot as I have not been able to locate information that would exclude PSC M4s from the firefly conversion program (from reading Mark Hayward's book). If anyone has information one way or the other please let me know. Bottom line is I probably wont change it as the photo shows a spare wheel sitting on top of the antenna pot. I'm not sure it's worth the hassle if it won't be seen anyway.

Hello again..

Back with another In progress photos.. Its slow going, as I'm a plodder and things like work get in the way of building.

Got the gun mostly done.. just about ready to start final assembly on it and the turret.. I am prob going to airbrush this up before I install the gun, If the assembly will alow for it.

Richard, that is one beautiful looking Churchill, great job!

looking good D, nice clean build.

More setbacks and some progress. First I found out that my tank in the photo doesn't have a pistol port in the turret and those types of turrets don't have applique armor on the turret cheek instead the armor is cast into the turret molding. I also went ahead and converted the antenna pot from a PSC type to a BLW type. Anyway here are some new pics:







tomorrow I'll hit the turret cheek area and tackle the suspension.

Got real busy today so less than 1 hour of bench time and I did less than I would have liked today. I got the turret cheek armor on and one of the bogies done.

Hopefully a quick question...

On the 2 pictures below, should any of these areas that I am pointing to with the blue arrow be green or white like the rest of the interior? I will be painting the turret floor itself OD.


In the above photo, I do mean the side walls, not the top of the sponsons.



Thanks.

John, wish I could help. I know next to nothing about the M10. I have some accumulated knowledge about shermans and that is pretty much where my know how ends. And even Shermans I'm constantly learning more about. Its kind of silly I'm not more familiar with the extended sherman family, M3, M10, M7, M36, M32 etc.

I can't even point you in the direction of a good resource for the M10 stuff.

Hi John

I've read quite a bit on Tank Destroyers and everything I've read on the U.S. ones has all the flat horizontal surfaces in the fighting compartment in Olive Drab to avoid white appearing from the air..

Here is a photo from PMMS showing the interior of an M-10 painted this way..



complete article from PMMS is here

http://www.perthmilitarymodelling.com/reviews/vehicles/afvclub/afv35024_01.htm

Delbert