¹⁄35

Tasca Sherman III

Stowage, priming, painting, and marking To match the pictures of the real tank I added some scratch-made gun cleaning rods to the brackets on the rear of the turret (made with Evergreen rod), along with a bag from the spares box (Tamiya, I think?) and two British-style tankers’ helmets bodged by filing down the flanges of some old Tamiya German helmets. Sure, they’re not perfect, but they’ll do.

Down on the hull I added a fuel can (from the venerable Italeri set) and made a tarp from PVA glue and tissue. I took a scrap of .030” plastic and added some other scraps to form a small “load”, pinned the tissue to the hull by gluing this “load” in place, and after it set I started the process of folding the tissue over and adding glue thinned with water. While it was wet I added a spare road wheel from the kit – it doesn’t look very secure but that’s where it is in the pictures! The best part was whittling a tin wash basin from some quarter-inch Plastruct rod.

The one thing I forgot to add was an empty periscope holder in the Commander’s hatch. I cut off the ends of a kit periscope and super-glued it in after all the painting was finished.

Painting

Painting started with a base coat of Tamiya’s olive drab XF-62, which is a touch too green for most US subjects (to my eye) but is fine as a base for British “OD” SCC 15. Then, I mixed up some “scale OD” by adding about 20% Dark Yellow XF-60 and hit the highlights. A further dollop of Dark Yellow was added and the edges of the hull and turret-top “corners” got a very highlighted hit. A light dusting of thinned Earth added some dust below the sponsons.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that the kit has British markings, while I need Canadian ones. Since I plan to model several tanks from this regiment I splashed out on some Archer transfers for the AoS and Formation signs as well as Registration numbers so I could piece together the necessary “T-229994” on each side. I’ll no doubt use some of the Tasca decals in other projects.

While I added some shipping stencils (again from Archer) I resisted adding the yellow square squadron symbol on the rear or the bridging plate on the front since I couldn’t really see them in the photos. Adding rub-down markings can be a challenge – it took me six hours to do all the numbers etc! However, the results are excellent. To blend them in I went back to the spray booth to add a “fade” coat of thinned OD and scale OD over the markings, followed by even more Earth “dust”. Now all it needed was loads of details painted, before the real weathering began!