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Tamiya M26 Dragon Wagon and M4 Sherman

Sherman

The M4 Sherman was started in sub assemblies again. To start off the bogie assembly’s and wheels had to be changed .The bogie arm assemblies are molded in 1 piece and the bogie is not movable. I changed the wheel assemblies to the Academy bogies because there was extra mold casting detail and movable arms .The drive sprocket shaft was replaced with a resin shaft .I wanted to show parts of the tank was damaged. By removing the drive sprocket it gave a better display of the damaged hull. The lower hull had a Tank Workshop radial engine and Verlinden Sherman interior . The firewall in between the engine and fighting compartments had to be sanded back considerably to make the 2 detail sets sit in the right spot. Most of the sanding was done on the Verlinden firewall because it was thinker than the Tank Workshop set. At this stage you have constantly try dry fitting the upper and lower plastic tubs ensuring all the components fit together.

The upper hull was made with all the deck panels glued into position as per step 5 of the kit instructions .I left the engine hatch off because I wanted to portray the engine compartment open. Verlinden resin visors had been glued into the upper hull along with the plastic exhausts. It was here where I decided to tackle the all the episcope hatches. The plastic hatches had been dremelled out. ABER photo etch episcopes and holders had been used. On the inside of the circular episcope holder evergreen card was superglued on the inside to make it look thicker to scale. The center of the card was cut away to fit the episcope Aber folded brass episcopes had been folded with clear evergreen card for the visors. More evergreen card was used for the buffer pad just above the interior visor. This was a time consuming practice all up around 5-6 solid hours on the 3 visors. After this was done they had been dry fitted into the hatch and once I was happy with the positing they then got super glued in place. I then used a fine piece of wire rod and dropped Mr Surfacer 500 around the circular pieces to fill in any gaps.