So we had a big storm the other day, and the Sherman that I'd been working on apparently got blown off my workbench from a big gust of wind through a vent (my workroom is in the upper part of our garage). I'd closed the windows, but didn't even think of the lovured vent right over the top shelf on the workbench. Of course, had we not been hit by a freakin' hurricane it would've been perfectly ok.

The left front road wheel strut is bent in, the right front suspension unit came off, and the upper hull and lower hull came apart.

The worst issue is that my driver, Cpl. Jones, is MIA, along with the board that goes across the front. I assume they're under the workbench, but there are a couple holes in the floor and they might have dropped into the garage below, which would be bad as that's packed with boxes. Lucky for me the Tamiya kit came with no fewer than 4 possible drivers, so a replacement won't be hard to find if Cpl. Jones, or his remains, are never recovered.

The good thing about this is that I wanted to separate the upper and lower hull so I can fill in the sponsons, but was afraid of messing things up too badly. Now that's already happened, I can go ahead and plug them up.

The tricky part is going to be fixing the road wheel. I think I'm going to have to carefully heat it to bend it back into place, but I'm not sure of how to go about that just yet.

have you offered a POW exchange with the carpet monster? see if he will do a swap for him over him something tasty like italeri figs as thats all they are good for #:-)

Hey Buck

I've got Tamiya's M4A3 in my spare parts box if you need some parts pm me and let me know and I'll fix you up.

Wolfsix

LOL...LOL...Lol..lol..........ahhhhhhhh, thx for the chuckle first thing in the mornin' mikeli! :-)

Tread.

Cpl Jones was a good man..... he'll be sadly missed.

Here's a last message from Jonesey:
PERMISSION TO SPEAK SIR! Corp. Jones reports that he wil fight to the last bullet against Dust-rats, Cockroaches and other vermin in the hope to be rescued some day. From now on I will cease all communications in order to save batteries an energy.
Corporal Jones, Out!


#:-)

What part of our beautiful state are you in?

I can transfer a couple tank crewmen to your unit. PM me a rec form and I'll have them reassigned. They're Tamiyan, so you'll have to keep an eye on them, but they'll do you right.

I've got left over crewman driver busts and one standing guy from the 105 M4A3. Still on the sprue! they're painted olive drab, but otherwise completely untouched. Let me know if you need any of 'em.

In honor of cpl. Jones...

I had the same experiences with a p47 thunderbolt and wind thru a window..No it did not fly, but hit the concrete floor smashing into a million pieces. It took the whole weekend to glue it back together....

Hey, tough break man!! First thing I would do is cover that vent!! But as far as the bent part goes, depending on how bad the bend is, try steaming the part (this is a trick I learned trying to get old Auroura kits to fit). But be gentle. :-)

JBM

Wind is bad, but Cats are the worst! One of our cats knocked over my 1/350 USS Arizona. Needless to say, the Japanese could hardly do worse. You know, if you don't want to fix it up, you could blacken the hatches and make it into a Panther casualty. That's what I do with my dammaged models.

I'm pleased to announce that Corporal Jones was successfully rescued at approximately 8:30 p.m. local time February 27th. The brave soldier managed to evade certain death at the fangs of several black widow spiders. "It was horrible! Their bodies were twice as big as my head! I couldn't get away from them because my arms end just after my elbows and I don't have legs!" he was quoted after being pulled out from behind some cardboard boxes using a shop-vac with a piece of nylon stocking put over the end of the hose. The spiders were unavailable for comment.

Also recovered were a pair of binoculars belonging to Corporal Jones' tank commander, a lift hook, and an antenna base for a Hummer. All three parts popped out of some tweezers while being worked on and went flying across the room. Still missing is the board that sits between the front fenders.

Thanks for the offer of parts, but lucky for me the Tamiya kit comes with several redundant sprues, so I've got a replacement front board.

Steam! That's a great idea! The bend isn't really that bad, in fact with the tracks on you'd need to be looking for it to see it, but of course I'd see it every time. I didn't want to use my heat gun, since the heat would be kind of uncontrollable, and fire or heated up tools would probably distort the plastic too much. It just so happens that I've got a little Krups espresso machine that's pretty much useless since it can only make 1 shot of espresso at a time, but the little steam shooter thing would give nice, controllable heat right where I need it. I think I'll try it out on some scrap bits first and see how it works.

Ambrose, I'm in Sunnyvale. It blew pretty hard here during that storm, but we were lucky and didn't get any flooding.

Buck Gully, you're a stones throw away from me. I'm in San Jose. Are you in any local modeling clubs? or do you know of any. I haven't had time to seek them out.

Congrats on finding Jones. The local resistance should be commended for their work in smuggling him out!

I figured with him being a Tamiyan, that he was AWOL, there is something about them when they get close to the beaches. If you hadn't found him when you did, he probably would have.

Congrats on the "air rescue" of Cpl Jones. It's good to hear he's still with us. Nothing like "field" repairs. I hope you have improved your rear echelon security problem. I used to live in Sunnyvale many decades ago before it became microchip/hi tech heaven.

I've only just restarted modeling, so I haven't gotten into the whole club thing. When buying stuff a few weeks ago the guy at D&J Hobby pointed out that the Silicon Valley Scale Modelers were having a show that Sunday, and I planned to go, but then never did. I did bookmark their site, though: http://www.svsm.org/.

Back on topic, my plans to harness the power of steam have hit a roadblock. The crappy cappuchino machine I wanted to use was put in the garage for two reasons: I knew it could only make 1 cup at a time, but I didn't know that it was missing a part. A critical part, a small disc that keeps the steam from coming out the drip part and keeps it going out the steamer doohickey. Unlike Cpl. Jones, it's lost and gone forever. I'm going to see if they sell replacements for that, and if not make my own.

Ok, I got the espresso machine working by stuffing the drip section with aluminum foil. Then I used the steamer to put some bends in a bit of sprue.

Before:


After:


It worked extremely well, especailly after I took off the squirt nozzle on the tip of the steamer. It takes a few seconds to heat up the part enough to get it to bend, and the part never really got hot enough to flop around, but it definitely makes the plastic bend nicely, without binding up, cracking or even changing color.

Gloves are a good idea when doing this. The steam is extremely hot and can burn skin easily.

Then I tried it on the bent road wheel suspension:





Interestingly, the steam didn't strip off the paint as I feared it would, but it lightened the color quite a bit. I'm not sure if that's because there were multiple layers of different paint on there or it actually altered the paint somehow. I'm going to try some experiments this weekend to see if this can be replicated and used somehow.