Thanks, Dogfish! These are a sampling of a larger collection. The Lebanese Firefly has a complete interior, and was featured in AMPS Boresight a few years ago. The Egyptian AMX was also shown in AMPS, though that's a much simpler conversion of DML and Heller parts. If I were to to it again, I'd sacrifice an EBR-10 kit for the turret and use a Tasca/Asuka hull. The Tulip Firely was seen in Military Modelcraft International, and the Skink was submitted there but hasn't been slotted in for publication.
Right now I'm trying to figure out how to finish a Firefly Ic from the Guards Armoured Division. It's gray, from the final parade in June of '45. How do you weather a freshly-painted tank? Any wash work I do will have to be really subtle, and of course no mud, dust, rust, or scratches.
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
Post by barkingdigger on Nov 17, 2013 9:27:50 GMT -5
Wow - nice conversions! Where'd the Skink turret come from?
As for "weathering" a freshly-painted parade tank, you're damned by the critics if you do it right! The only thing that should show any real weathering is tracks, tyre treads, and exhausts, with perhaps a bit of "helping" the shadows and highlights in the fresh paint with a dark pin wash in the crevices and a light drybrush on the raised shiny corners. I assume any fuel spills would be wiped up in the pre-parade clean-up? Tyre faces might have been wiped down with an oily rag to make them shine, so only the treads would scuff in contact with the dusty tracks. You might use a slightly darker shade for the lower-hull sides to accentuate the shadows lurking under the sponsons.
Barkingdigger, that Skink turret came from a vendor's table at the Seattle IPMS show a few years ago, in a big manila envelope with other parts including a hull. From some sleuthing I discovered that it was a Panzer Resin Models conversion, some years old, done by Marcos Serra in Brazil. The turret wasn't all that accurate, once I compared it to images of surviving unfinished shells in Canada. It took a lot of grinding and epoxy putty to refine the shape. I used RB Models 20mm Oerlikons for the barrels, since beyond the breech they are identical to the Polstens actually fitted. I converted a Tasca M4A1 to a Grizzly hull and used Panda's CDP track set.
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
Thanks, Frank; glad you like 'em! I always have several projects in various states of work. Currently a gray Firefly Ic from the Guards Armoured Division final parade needs to be weathered, if you can call it that. I'm unsure what to do for a freshly painted tank as noted above. Percolating for a long time now (and dormant) is an M51 for Chile, done using a Tasca M4A3 HVSS with a scratchbuilt turret bustle, Dragon gun shield, and Dragon metal barrel. The whole interior is being scratched as well. And I'm plugging away on that Madill yarder, and ought to use a couple of my M51 conversions to finish the welded hull tank and do a Tamiya one for which the kit was done in the first place. But I'm also working through the last engineering issues for a Chilean M60 HMGS conversion, so that's getting attention, too. And so are the master patterns for a Repotenciado conversion.
Greg
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
Speedster, I'm doing them for myself. I released a Chilean M51 conversion kit for Tamiya last spring, by Greg Buechler Enterprises, and it's just about sold out the initial production run of 50 sets. My caster tells me that the molds have some life in them yet, and I have enough brass frets left to do nine more kits. Beyond that, I would need to start a waiting list and when I got enough pre-orders I could commit to ordering a new sheet of etched brass and new molds & castings. A couple of years ago I did an aluminum barrel for the 60mm HMGS fitted to some Chilean Shermans, and I'm expanding on that to do a complete conversion for that. I'd like to use that same barrel to do a Chilean M24 Chaffee conversion once the AFV Club kit is out. I'm working on masters to convert the Tasca/Asuka Fireflies to the Repotenciado version. The major challenges there are the muzzle brake, and figuring out some kind of fixture so that a modeler can bend brass rod to a consistent shape to make the frames for the stowage baskets on the turret. It's slow work, because the thinking-things-through takes time, and sometimes the first couple of ideas on how to do something don't work out. And not everything that can be scratchbuilt can be easily or economically cast, too. That has been the biggest challenge in moving beyond scratchbuilding for myself to building for molding & casting. You can't always do things the same way for both.
Greg
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
Thanks, I started a Chilean M51 years ago with the Academy kit, I just was working off a couple small photos I found the net. I am curious about your conversions. I really do understand where you are coming from with scratch building vs production. That is two different worlds. Glad to hear you was working on them.
Thanks! That Skink was a fun one, helped along by the Service Publications booklet and some nice images of surviving unfinished turret shells that were found in British Columbia about ten years ago on a cadet rifle range. The CDP tracks were a challenge; way more links than usual for VVSS. I'm sure I've got a few things wrong, but there are so few images and no survivors. A little educated guesswork is required to tackle a subject so poorly documented.
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
Gary's New Zealand Sherman IB prompted me to post this one, built several years ago. It's Dragon, with a metal barrel (Armorscale?) and various resin stowage boxes and other bits.
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
Man, if my wife saw me looking at the computer and making all these "ooohs" and "aaahs", there's no way she'd believe I was looking at Shermans. I really like the Lebanese Shermie, looks like God was throwing rocks at it.
Agreed! In my case she'd think I was looking at cars. That Lebanese Firefly was a challenging project, since there's a full scratchbuilt interior in there. Tranny & seats scavenged from an Academy M10, but everything else was fabricated. The engine was fun; with those eight little rocker covers that look like hot cross buns. I made one, and cast up all eight. The turbocharger is a couple of wheels from a 1/72 airplane; there's a lot of detritus like that in my spares bin.
"You could probably use some armor. A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge!"
I like that one a lot. So is that a Cummins or something else? I'm a little sketchy on where the Lebanese got Fireflys, but I can surely see the replacement of the Chrysler/Rube Goldberg Multi-bank..... If it's a Cummins, a drop-in engine compartment for the M50 would be cool.....
Yeah, too much noise and she thinks I'm on Flyin' Miatas' website again.
Not a Cummins, but a French Poyaud 520S2, and the same engine was used by Argentina for their Repotenciados. Very similar heavy-equipment diesel, with similar bore, stroke, and chamber capacity to the Cummins VT8-460 and the Detroit Diesel 8V-71 series. All are V8s with 60-ish degree cylinder bank angles, not 90 degrees like your usual car. Thus more vibration, but none of these rev past 3000 (ever!) and are diesels so rather shaky anyway. None of which matters in an excavator, bulldozer, or tank.