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Building the Churchill Mk III c/w Interior

The construction of the turret and basket was spread over the build as you need to construct the basket at an early stage. I have added most of the build picture together here in the article for ease of reference. AFV provide a cool metal barrel for the 6pdr in the kit and Inside the Armour a pretty detailed interior but no fittings for the roof. I cut down the kit parts and bodged some fittings here to open up the turret a bit more although on hind sight I could have done a better job but it had the required effect.

The conversion set provides you with a fairly detail set of internal fitting for the turret. The No 19 radio needed to be thinned down at the back to fit into the space and I added a variometer from the Formations set to provide further detail. You get a wire cage to use on the front of the No 19 set if you wish but I choose to leave this part off.

I added a Bren gun from the spares box into the appropraite area in the turret basket and scratch built a turret travers mechanism. This part actually existed, but one of the issues with the instructions was the parts listing. Whilst Chris re-did this page of instructions showing the parts with the number beside them, the parts themselves were/are unnumbered, so you need to identify the part in the picture and then match it to the build instructions and with some quite small parts and the angle/quality of the pictures that can make life difficuly. I have suggested that in future releases Inside the Armour show not only the part number but a description of what it is in their listings as this aids both understanding and identification when building. If they can develop the casting technique to include the part number on the pour plug to this would also help.

With any build like this you will be working across several sets of instructions, reference pictures, stowage diagrams etc so anything that makes building easier is a major plus.

The biggest propblem with building the turret was the turret ring , which had spillage from the casting and was uneven in thickness, but with anything if you take some time you can usually sort out the problem. Inisde the Armour have re-mastered and changed a number of the parts as a result of the blog and the turret ring was one which was re-cast. It was excellent to see a manufacturer listen and act on customer feedback.