Here's some pics of my just finished Tamiya M4 Early, this was a gift and I more or less built straight out the box. Have been away for a while trying building planes and having a major computer failure. It was good fun to build and just fell together, I know there are accuracy issues but I just wanted a quick easy return to armour. What do you think ?

Wow,it looks really good.The weathering of the tank and the stowage looks great.Other then the gear just glued to the turret sides,your camo and weathering techniques are right on.Good stuff.

Agreed, it does look good. Next time though, wax your thread used for the equipment to do away with the little fuzzies. Also, as Anthony mentioned, come up with a solution for the turret stowage.

Paul it looks real good I really like the camo, what colors did you use To fix the turret storage problem you just have to put some metal wire to simulate grap handles under the storage and then attach it to the wire

I suffer from this problem as well. I recently found that annealed steel wire works great for clevises. Accuracy issues aside, awesome work! Really feeling the camo. One of the reasons I stopped building Shermans is that I thought they were all od. Your work has convinced me to pick back up an old Dragon Sherman for next year's Jax Con. What color did you paint the cleats on the tracks?

The colors used look great. And nice job including the stowage and figures

Thanks for all the kind words. The colours are just what were specced in the instructions Tamiya XF59 (Desert yellow) and XF62 (Olive Drab) albeit with a bit of filtering and washes with artists oils. Matt, the tracks were done with a coat of black followed by mixes of Humbrol enamels and a bit of dry brushing with a light grey mix. I like to just mess about mixing enamel colours to get what I think looks "right". The model represents a Sherman of the 756 Tank battalion in Italy 1944 again as the instructions. I found the following photo on the veterans website so thanks to them for it's use here. Could this be my model? It's captioned "Cassino, Italy

February 8th, 1944

M4 tank number C-14
(from the 3rd Platoon of
"C" Company) stuck in
the mud near the Rapido
River.

Cheers Paul

Paul that very well could be your Tank but the 1 in the photo is missing most of its left side fender so i waould assume that your tank was before it got stuck in the mud

I really like it. I haven't built the Tamiya kit in about 20 years, but you've done it justice. The one thing I'd mention is that the tank would have had a base of OD, with the earth yellow over that. Therefore, the lower hull and whatnot would be OD rather than earth yellow.

Jesse, thanks for your comments. I did wonder about this, the machines were all painted OD at manufacturing and would the tanks transferred to sunnier climes be completely recoated or just the areas where it would be easiest and quickest without stripping down assemblies. thanks for answering that one.