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Building the Churchill Mk III c/w Interior

Introduction

The release of the new AFV Club Churchill prompted a couple of purchases last year of the new kit. My intention had been to use the kits for conversions, one for the ARK Mk I and one for an AVRE Mk IV.

Chris Meddings from Inside the Armour contacted me and asked me is I would do a build and review of a new kit he had been working on namely an Interior Set for the Mk III Churchill Gun Tank and the resulting build sprang form that initial request.

The Interior was a kit Chris had been working on for some time and as I love vehicles with interiors I couldn’t really resist despite the fact that it knocked my build schedule right out the window.

The Beginning

The Interior Set duly arrived and a review got underway. My initial thoughts on the kit were that improvements could be made on the instructions and Chris kindly did this which help in the build although I still think a few tweaks could be made to them:

ITA Interior Review Live links

Also a few of the parts lacked sharp detail and some edges weren’t quite squared off but overall a very creditable effort for their first production.

I hadn’t built the AFV Club Churchill before so it was a double learning curve with the addition of the Interior set and I decided at the same time to incorporate one of the Resicast Churchill engines into the project, why not go the whole hog so to speak.

As I hadn’t originally considered a Gun Tank for the kits, I had a look around at possible options. I have for some time wanted to build a Churchill without the side mudguards and as the AFV kit provides these in separate sections it does open up a lot of possibilities for finish which weren’t available in the old Tamiya kit, at least not with out major surgery.

I found a suitable candidate to use as a reference on Page 78 of Mr Churchill’s Tanks by David Fletcher. It was a pre-Dieppe tank of the 14th Canadian Army Tank Regiment (The Calgarys) and it had the specification I was looking for ie: no side mudguards and also fitted the AFV Club decal set so no added expense there.

This vehicle needed the early style Churchill tracks but I had already acquired a set of the Resicast ones for my ARK Mk I project so pretty much everything I need was to hand.

Kit parts and sets: To the right is the AFV kit, below the Inside the Armour conversion set, the Resicast Churchill Early Tracks and the Resicast Churchill Engine