In spite of a lot of self inflicted wounds I really like the Takom kit and will be doing their Grant and multiple M31' when they are released. Looking in my closet of doom I spied this



So I decided to give it a shot while I have M3' on the brain. This is a later boxing and has the corrected bogey towers. I will however be using the Asuka/Tasca running gear for this build.

Upper hull pieces laid out and the interior knockout marks filled since I will be doing the interior.



I'd read elsewhere of fit problems on the rear plates and this was a possible solution.

Hi Chris!
I was lurking around your Takom Lee topic with interest, and now seeing that you also have Academy's rendition of the tank, I'm curious if you could do some sort of comparision between the 2 upper hulls.

Some people bash Academy's upper hull for having wrong angles in the area of front left corner, noone ever pointed his finger as to what exactly is wrong, but the mud have stuck.
Some people say it's allright and that there are no errors, and I tend to lean in this direction (checked academy hull against plans from Militaria M3 Lee/Grant book and found it to be spot on). Terry Ashley's review on PMMS says Academy is spot on dimensionally, so I was curious how the two compare.

Anyway I look forward to your progress with both kits!

Cheers and happy modelling,
Greg

Sometimes "experten" can really black-ball an OK kit with false or erroneous information. Must be a corporate conspiracy!

I agree. I have the Academy Grant kit with new boogies and it seems a good rendition of the real beast with only some minor faults. I will buy the new Takom M31 but not the their Grant.
Really interesting in this thread too.

Check out the Steven Zaloga article on his build of this kit, Academy moulded the joint between the left front plate and left superstructure side at 53 degrees when it was actually 50 and the front superstructure side plate to the inside of the 75mm gun was blatanty not heavily sloped enough. Really noticable errors.

Don't know about all that, it certainly looks like an M3 Lee to my eye. Following some of the info on PMMS I proceeded with the intent to minimize gaps and seams and see where that leads. I did hold this build up to the recently done Takom offering and they are close in appearance.









Prepping the interior

Nice work Chris, you are in a unique position, building both kits at the same time. I'm really enjoying watching your builds, and seeing the differences between the two.