Replicating a photograph: the liberation of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, part 4

Got some more work done on the Firefly this week. For one, I’ve assembled the resin turret by Verlinden Productions. It did not come with a commander’s cupola, but the one from the Tamiya kit fit perfectly.

With its turret on the Firefly is really starting to take shape!

The Verlinden kit also comes with an armoured plug to cover up the bow machine gun. Because of the much larger size of the 17pdr and its ammunition, the bow machine gun was removed from the tank to make room. Unsurprisingly, the bow machine gunner was also removed, leaving the commander, gunner, loader/radio-operator and driver.

Front view showing the added bow gun plug and frontal appliqué armour plates. Initially I glued on the armour plug the wrong way round, but with some careful breaking, sanding and regluing the mistake was rectified.

I also added some details like lights and a little (storage?) box to the rear of the vehicle that can be seen on the black and white photograph. It’s made from a bit of resin sprue cut and sanded to size. The Tamiya hull had several holes in it for attaching stowage. As I will be adding my own, I filled in the holes with some Miliput.

Finally, I caved and bought two more conversion kits. I have now officially spent more on conversion kits than on the base model itself... The first kit are a set of British crew members by Bronco. The Tamiya kit does include figures, but these are American. And even though their overalls look pretty similar, their head gear does not. American tank crews were sensible enough to wear a helmet to protect their noggins when being bounced around inside a metal box filled with sharp-edged equipment. British crews, on the other hand, wore nothing more than a beret.

The other kit, also by Bronco, is a set of workable tracks. T62 type tracks to be precise (the Sherman Tank Site has a great overview of the different types of tracks used on the Sherman). The Tamiya kit has those one-piece rubber/vinyl type tracks that you glue together and wrap around the wheels. I was a little worried that the acrylic paints I use would rub off very easily and therefore picked up this set of hard plastic tracks. It would also increase the realism, as the photograph clearly shows that the vehicle I’m replicating is fitted with T62 all-metal tracks, identifiable by the wave pattern and three dots on each track pad.

I hadn’t realised, however, how labour intensive constructing the tracks is. Each track pad consists of five parts (bottom pad, upper pad, track pin and two end connectors). According to the instructions, one set of tracks consists of 83 pads for a total of 415 parts per track. That’s 830 parts for one tank! On top of that, only the bottom pad, upper pad and two end connectors are supposed to be glued, but not the track pins. Or, as the instructions put it ‘please careful to glue the parts, too much glue will influence the action of movable.’

After 70 minutes of work I had managed to assemble this tiny bit of track: 11 pads with only four of the end connectors in place. And I’m pretty sure that it was never going to bend properly after the glue had fully dried. In short, to quote a very old meme, ain’t nobody got time for that! Luckily they only cost me a tenner...

So, back to the bendy rubbery/vinyly Tamiya tracks it is.