¹⁄35

Churchill Never Looked So Good

Construction

Tamiya’s Churchill has been released in the 80ies and much to my surprise there are some sinkholes on certain parts of the kit. I did not expect that and I also cannot recall that any review pointing on this. Kit construction is straightforward and without the conversion it would have taken 3 days to complete this beast. The AL-BY conversion consists of a hollow turret, the mortar ( moveable ), the rectangular hatches for the side sponsons and the frontal armour of the upper hull.

On earlier Marks a part this frontal armour is set back a bit, while on the Mark VII the whole armour is straight. Thus the upper front armour of the kit does not fit with AL-BY’s front plate. I rebuilt the front and front upper armour from plastic sheet and added details according pictures and photographs. I also had to remove the 3 periscopes ( driver & co driver ), shortened 2 in height and added them again

Comparing the side sponsons of Mark IV and Mark VII opened many distinctions. Apart from the different hatches Mark VII sponsons were welded and up-armoured, earlier Marks had them bolted. The design of the opening behind the idler wheel is different. Earlier Marks also had a slide which handled the dirt gushing from this hole. I cut off 2/3 of the outer sponsons and rebuilt them with plasticsheet, the slide has been built from Evergreen L-profiles. The smaller bolts were produced with a Grainers Set and 0,4mm Plastic. The big nuts come from a baby rattle which I was begging for from a friend of my wife ( THANKS, Doris ! )

While I was examining photos I discovered, that all Churchill AVRE’s with Petard-Mortar had strange holders fixed on the side sponson. I was puzzled about the functionality, as they were too delicate to carry a dozer but finally I got the conclusion.
The holders were intended to fix a frame for a bobbin of canvas designed to lay a 10ft. wide carpet over soft sand. Infantry was due to follow the tank on this carpet. After landing these bobbins were removed from the tanks. Obviously there were different versions of this holders in use and due to lack of time I decided to scratchbuilt the easiest one. At the rear a small box has to be removed, which results in a hole which I covered with a larger box from Verlinden.

Copyright ©2002 - Text by Werner Kampfhofer (tankbuster). Photos by Wolfram Bradac. All Rights Reserved.