Little Tanks & Tiny People

It took a solid month, but she is done! This build became a lot more complicated than I had expected at the start, but some minor niggles aside I am quite pleased with the end result. Before I give you a full ‘walk around’ and show you how close I got it to look like the picture, let me first give you some additional historical background. As we had already established, the vehicle is a Sherman Ic Firefly of the 1st East Riding Yeomanry. The markings on the rear of the vehicle can be read as follows. The 35 on the rear of the bustle probably refers to the individual tank, which belonged to: B Squadron (yellow square) of the 2nd Armoured Regiment (white 52 on red square) of 33rd Armoured Brigade (‘hour glass’ of green and black triangle). The original of this picture is held at the Imperial War Museum under object number IWM B 11382. The back of the photograph  tells us that it was taken on 27 October by Lt. Handford. The book October 1944. Den Bosch. Bevochten en bevrijd ( October...

The Dalton brothers on their painting stands (mini jam jars). Did some painting this week. As a nice change of pace I started with the crew. I’ve also laid down most of the base colours on the tank itself. First I gave everything, including the tracks, a coat of grey primer from a rattle can. I then gave the tracks a coat of black, so they now look exactly the same as before painting! Having a proper base coat will be important for the next steps, though. I used Vallejo olive drab for the hull and turret. The shop I purchased it from didn’t have the regular variety in stock, so I bought the olive drab from their airbrush line. I found that Vallejo Air paints work fine with brushes, but that they have a very low pigment count. As it’s a bit thinner than regular paint I expected that I would need one or two more coats to get good coverage, but in the end it took five (!) layers for the primer coat to no longer show through. The end result is pretty smooth, though. I’ve also painted ...

Two posts in one weekend and it’s stowage time! Apart from painting, adding the stowage is probably my favourite part of building tanks. Stowage is great for personalising your vehicles and for making them look ‘lived in’. Re-examining the photograph  I noticed that the bit of the turret with the number 35 painted on it was not the back of the armoured bustle for the radio, but actually a stowage box mounted to the back of it. I could’ve purchased a resin kit, but decided that I had spent enough money on this project and instead scratch built one. I used the plastic from an expired Toyota service card, so depending on how you look at it this is either the cheapest or the most expensive bit of customisation ever. For the hinges I used thin cardboard glazed with super glue, which will hopefully make it less absorbent when it comes to painting. The large stowage box on the rear of the engine deck was made in a similar fashion. The rolled-up tarp I made using some toilet paper soaked i...

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...