Hey all, just dug this one out the poile and thought it would make a good build log.
So here's the Cyber-Hobby boxing of Dragons ye olde Firefly IC Hybrid. A nice kit that includes some of the new DS tracks (I was always put off by the old boxings individual links so a welcome addition), some PE parts, a cool looking Browning .50, LOTS of spares including 2 full sets of VVSS suspension and wheels, and Masterbox's British Paratroopers. So I got a lot for my money. Looking at the kits instructions it looks like about half of whats in the kit isn't needed.
However, despite all these goodies not all is as it seems. There have always been a few things about the kit that bugged me when I compared it with photo's of the real things, so it got put in the pile to be dealt with when I could figure it out. By chance I was having a clear out of the spare room recently and found a few old modelling mags. Flicking through I found an article in the April/May 2001 edition of Military Modelling by Phil Dyer about this very kit. In it Phil points out all the kits inaccuracies and how to set them right with a bit of scratch building and using parts the instructions tell you to junk! So I have no excuse not to get this right! I'll be making a little diorama using the commander from Miniarts British Armoured Car crew and Dragons Commonwealth Infantry.

In short the corrections involve:
- Making correct rear stowage bins and not the big Firefly V bin they say to use.
- Drilling a hole for the engine crank at the back of the tanks hull (already done!).
- Removing the molded on canvas cover strip around the bow M/G.
- Adding turret cheek armour and filling the pistol port.
- Adding the missing sand shield mountings on the hull sides.
- Some rearranging of the tools.
- Fitting the correct gun travel lock.
All easy things to do. I hope anyone else building this kit will find my log of use. It might also be possible that some of these additions might also be relevant to any British Sherman I whichever gun it had.

subscribed to this thread and ready to follow your build.

oill be watching with interest!

Looks like a good one. I'll be following along.

Got this one in the stash as well, might start it after I finish this @#$%^! Tiger I (P). I seriously hate zimmerit!

Good luck with that! I've tried doing zimmerit a couple of times and made a right mess of it.

Anyway, the first job to do is the wheels and suspension. A long dull job thats best done with now so I dont slow down later.

Suspension units are now done. The one thing I hate on Shermans projects are the suspension, especially complex working units like these. I always get them done and out the way first so the project doesn't get bogged down later. They went together fairly well but they did need a bit of filler to smoothe out the joins between the forn and back parts. Also the top skids (I dont know the 'official' name for these) had some funny nobbly bits on the inside that needed cutting off and sanding down. These are some part of the mould and they sprout up on a LOT of parts on nearly every Dragon kit I've bought. Very awkward to do on the inside curve and made cleaning them up more work and time lost.
I painted them using humbrol 116, a fairly decent coulour to use for British Army dark green. I painted a couple of the wheels in US olive drab just to add a bit of variation (probably replacements fitted in the field). They'll need a bit of touching up with paint before final fitting. I can now get started on the hull.



First thing I've done with the hull top is carve off the the strip around the M/G port and improve the texturing of the cast hull front. As it is, it has a few random lumps with smooth areas inbetween. I wanted to make the surface texture between the cast front and welded plates of the rear 3 quarters to be a lot more noticeable but still look to scale. After giving the hull front a light sand I thinned down some green putty with liquid glue and stippled it on with an old nylon brush, followed by a light stippling with neat liquid glue to blend it in. I also did the same to the transmission housing and exhausts. I've done this before on a few other tanks and it really does improve the look of vehicles that were built with a mix of cast parts and rolled plates.

Nice job so far. I actually find Sherman bogies much easier to put together then some other tanks. The pics of your bogies and tracks skids are pretty blurry but the knobby things are ejector knibs. Dragon uses alot of these to reduce the amount of ejector pin marks (EPM) that plague other manufacturers kits such as Tamiya and Trumpeter. I much prefer them to the EPM as they can usually be snipped smooth with some good quality sprue cutters and swiped clean with a sanding stick. EPM can be a mess at times and have a tendency to be right next to details that you do not want removed. I think this is a very cool looking vehicle and I look forward to seeing your's completed.

Roy

Cool, its thoughtful of Dragon to do that. Just wish they didnt put them in awkward places.
Only managed to paint the exhausts today and build up the other bits that go under the rear hull overhang. Nothing to report here, all went together with no issues. Theres also supposed to be a curved exhaust deflector according to the article. Have to figure out how to do that. Maybe a section of tube split down the middle? The tank does need a US type towing pintle bracket fitting at the rear end. All Shermans should have them, even though the British Army fitted its own type of towing gear to the back. Again this is missing from the kit, but easy to make up with a section of Plastruct U-section trimmed to shape and with a hole drilled in the middle. Another simple job done.
This will be the last post for a week or so as we're off on holiday Saturday.

Hi all.
After a week and half in Scotland, luckily missing all the bad weather they're now having, and settling into a new job as soon as I got back, I'm back into some sort of routine and can get cracking on this again.
Following pics show the rear hull as it now stands with some improvements to accuracy and fit.
First pic shows the original factory fitted towing pintle I made up from some U-section plastic strip. The British type will be fitted just above this. Some parts have been painted here now as they will be hard to reach when the hull tops on. I rusted the exhausts by first stippling them with thinned green putty and painted them dark brown. When that had dried thoroughly I added some Mig pigments dark and light rust powder. Looks pretty good to me.


Now, there are a couple of fit issues here. Firstly parts H10 and H11, which form a sidewall and bottom half of the sand shield fitting need some careful trimming. As they are, they are too vertical. The rear hull plate is at a slight angle, so if you glue them as is the hull top will not fit. I solved this by slicing a little bit off at a time untill I got a good fit. I have included a diagram at the bottom of this post on where to cut. Any cuts here will be hidden by the large blocky airfilters anyway. Secondly, the exhaust pipes stick out a bit too far, again interfering with the fit of the hull top. I solved this by glueing a small scrap of 20thou plasticard behind their location point which moved them back a bit. Simple problems to fix but again the result of Dragon's cobbling this kit together from sprues of various different Sherman's.
So far I've had no luck making up the exhaust deflector. I tried with tubing split down the middle but the cuts just looked way off level. But, I have seen photo's of them with and without these fitted, so I might go without.

Apologies in advance for the poor quality photo (bloody camera seems to be taking crap photo's just lately), but this does highlight another problem area.
As it is, the British leaf-sprung towing gear will not fit properly on the rear hull. The problem is that the end brackets are too short and the whole thing will not fit over the handle on the rear door. Solution, I lengthened these by about 2mm with scrap pladtic stuck on and then cut and sanded to shape. These additions are white in the picture. If I can I will try to get a better photo of this.
Working on this does leave me with one question. With this gear in place, how would the crew open up that rear door when doing any work on the engine

Apologies for the late progress updates. Been a busy few weeks.
I've now got the hull together and its a least now looking like a tank.
A couple of things to mention. Before joining the hull pieces some holes need drilling in the upper for air vents and fire extinguishers. The instructions fail to mention to do this before gluing the parts together. There are a lot of location points marked out for tools, but most of the tools the instructions say to use are either not needed or are in different places. The magazine article and scale plans indicate the correct tools to use and their locations. I will come to this at a later point, and luckily all the correct tools are in this kit as spare parts. I found the join between the upper and lower hull was very flimsy and that the lower piece could be pushed up into the upper very easily. I decided to reinforce this with some L-section plastruct. I cut three lengths about an inch long (doesn't really matter as they won't be seen) and stuck them into the upper hull leaving a space for the lower to fit flush with the hull sides. After this had been left overnight to dry solid, I stuck on the lower hull. This made a much better and stronger join.



Next up, using the magazine article as a guide, the location slots for the mud guards parts H16 & H17, need filling in. Firefly IC's did not have these fitted, only VC's.


Next job to do is sanding the bottoms of the sponsons and the attaching the rest of the parts to the hull.

Made a little more progress today. This time with the front mudguards, again not without some issues.
Dragon have included some PE parts to make up part, but not all, of the mudguards. These are parts MB1 and MB2. However, the front of the guards remain plastic (parts J6 and J7). These are likely to be the original parts. The original plast parts that are replaced by MB1 & 2, are nowhere to be found in the box. The main issue is with the thickness of these different parts and how they fit together. The problem is that parts J6 & 7 were originally designed to fit onto plastic parts and not PE. So they have a tab on their undersides. If you try to butt join this onto the bottoms of PE MB1 & 2, you end up with a noticeable step between the two. The only way I can see of solving this is to cut off the tabs and then very carefully glue them together with superglue. The undersides of the guards should also look much better without the rather large tab spoiling them. I also had to sand back a little on the tops of the differential housing to get J6 & 7 to fit flush, although I'm pretty sure this was due to my re-texturing than any problem with the kit.
Like some other things with this kit, the seemingly random mix of new and parts seems like a half assed approach and I do wonder if Dragon did a test fit before it went into production. It would have been much better to either stick entirely with the original plastic, or replace ALL of the mudguard parts with PE. Having seen this done on other Shermans it is possible. I have hopes that the new tool IC has solved a lot of these problems.

Interesting - still watching! Are you from Scotland or just visiting there? I'm building 18 Shermans at the mo!

I've still got a fair bit to go yet with this.
18 Shermans??? Good luck with them. Are they all 1:35 or a mix of scales?
Just went on holiday. My girlfriend loves the edinburgh comedy festival so we end up going every August.

18 Shermans is a lot, but I would if I had the time

I was just thinking that it would be nice if we could make build logs like these into downloadable pdf files.

Yikes nearly a month since my last update! Well no one can accuse me of being a speed builder.
Jeremy I agree It would be handy for a lot of us if build logs were available in PDF format. Unfortunatly I only have a PDF reader so wouldn't have the first idea about making one.

So on to my progress so far.
First off I carried on with work on the mudguards. I trimmed off and sanded flush the tabs that caused some allignment issues. I carefully attached these first to the differential housing with humbrol liquid poly. This gave me time to line them up with the PE parts. After this had dried solid overnight I ran a little super glue on the underside of the guard between the plastic and PE parts to get a good strong join. I also found a little hole on both sides (pointed out in red) and filled these with a little milliput. I also this stuff earlier in the build to build up the gaps around the bow mg plug and press in a weld pattern.
I also spent a careful couple of hours marking out and drilling bolt holes in the sand shield strips before attaching these to the hull sides. Not easy with plastic strip thats just 2mm wide! I'm sure a couple strayed off, but a little strategically placed muck will hide these when its done.


Last couple of pics show the strips in place. I noticed when looking at photos that the front mudguard strips were seperate from the long ones down the sides and made from an angled piece of steel. So I used a similar piece of plastruct and drilled the holes in these. This also hid the serious difference in thickness between the plastic and PE parts that I had some earlier concerns about.



Next job to do is fitting the fiddly bits to the hull and then making the proper stowage bins.

Stephen

How did you Firefly IcH project turn out??

Eugene

NIce start Stephen, I built this one last year, many issues but one fun build. I`ll tag along.

Eugene, I'm afraid to say it got stalled at this stage. I realised I needed to make a curved exhaust deflector on the underside of the rear hull over hang. Never could get it right. And then campaign builds and work got in the way. I do mean to carry on with the build. I have two more campaigns to finish and then its back on. I don't like to keep projects like this on hold usually, especially given the high asking price of the kit and the extra work that's needed. Phillipe, for the most part the corrections are simple. More annoying than anything and mainly due to poor research and rushing a kit from a mix of parts from other boxings. The main benefit of this is that it gives us LOTS of spare Sherman bits. The irony is that not long after I started, Dragon released a new corrected Hybrid.
Stay tuned....

Ste

Hi Stephen ..Great build so far..One thing I noticed was the tansmission cover bolt strip ..this was molded all in one piece. You might try to blend the strip in a bit.
Keep up the good work ,I'm following along with great interest.

Rick

Cheers, that one got by me. Its a very badly piece. My plan was to hide the worst of it behind some stowage but every little bit of filler helps.

First off I'd like to offer a big apology to all those watching this build for my lack of progress. Lets just say that if I were building the Death Star, Darth Vader would not be very forgiving. Real life has just gotten in the way of this one.
Luckily that has now changed. College work is complete (which soon means a promotion at work) and the long summer holiday is about to start. All this means that the Firefly is now back on the work bench and I am determined to get it finished. If you see me lag, please post to give me a reminder!

Progress updates to follow soon.
Stephen

Some progress over the last week.
The new rear stowage boxes are now complete and mounted.
The long box on the rear deck was simple to make with some square section plastic, blanked off at the ends and a lid made from thin plasticard. Hinge and latches were then made from strip and rod.
The angular shaped box mounted on the rear proved to be more of a challenge. It neeeded some careful measurements from the plans, correcting to fit the kits slightly different dimensions and accurate cutting. It has taken three attempts to get right!
Here's the basic shape before cleaning up and the lid attaching.

And both boxes mounted in place. The second box still needs details adding but that's a quick job.


I've also accumulated some extra bits and pieces over the last few months to dress it up in. A set of resin stowage boxes by Ultracast, a generic set of Sherman etched details by Verlinden and a box of British tank stowage by Resicast. There's a LOT in this box and it should provide stowage for up to 3 or 4 vehicles if used with other items.


With the hull now well on the way to being finished, I plan on moving onto the turret this week.
Stephen

Next update.
I'm now calling the hull done for the time being. Last few bits like the siren, fire extinguishers, resin first aid box and etched vent covers are in place. I also added the last bit of detailing to the stowage bins. Some further scratch building was needed to make up the hinged covers for the drivers periscopes. Dragon only include 3, which is very thoughtful considering that 5 are needed! I made up the extra two from some plastic strip with the edges beveled with a file, I placed these above the hulls fixed forward periscopes.


Location holes for the vehicle tools have also been drilled with the weld seem trimmed in places to ensure a good fit of those. I still need to add the etch light guards but I'll do those last to avoid damaging them during the rest of the build. I'm in two minds about fitting the headlights. A lot of photo's show them removed by the crews.
Now onto the turret. I've plugged up the locating hole for the pistol port and added stowage loops made from thin wire. Looking at photo's these were fairly small and prone to bending, being there to secure rolled up cammo netting or tarps so I didn't want to make them too bulky. I might also carefully shave off the closed periscopes and model them up. If that makes sense?


Comments welcome.
Stephen.