The Sherman Jumbo, as an oddity, has had my interest for years. Partly because it IS an odd duck with an interesting story, and because there were no models of it. What do you mean Tamiya does? HA, as I said, no good models of it.
So about a year ago, in the same stash raid as when I got the M20 (see Past Work 4) from John O"Reilly (God rest his soul), I took the Tamiya M4A3E2 he had there as well. He gave me SUCH a great deal on everything I flipped a few more bucks and took it out of curiosity. Like the cat, it almost killed me. Tamiya makes good _quality_ kits, but this one is no where near accurate, especially on the transmission cover, the whole turret, and still had the trenches for welds on the upper hull, etc and no sponson covers above the tracks.
SO, it sat there for a while as "reference" and heated my desire to build it or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
So off to eBay I went and got the Tank Workshop aftermarket transmission cover and turret resin parts. I was determined to fix up the hull like my hero Steve Zaloga did on his. I have his book to go by :)
So I got the parts and looked at a dry fit. The trenches were staring at me and I knew I would have to let them down, because I looked on the shelf and there was a half finished Dragon M4A3 76mm (6325) sitting there. I had bought two of them three Christmas' ago from DragonUSAOnline when they were $27 US on sale (YEAH!!- Really!!) I built one and the other was not finished (I did them as a pair for so long and went on with one). See that one in Past Work 3 , It is the top Sherman.
SO, I scrapped the tranny cover from the Dragon kit without damage, popped off some photo etch parts, and salvaged the additional armor for the side and front glacis from the Tamiya kit, took the new TWS tranny cover and turret, and figured that I could bash that together. A bit of Apoxie Sculpt here, and some sprue there, with some evergreen strips and I was smokin'. The only real challenges I had with accuracy were the front bogies section which are supposed to squat down further in the front due to all the weight of the bigger, thicker transmission cover, the extra armor and the larger mantlet. I was bashing so I figured I would go scratching as well. I took one bogie assembly from each side for the front and put them aside. I did some cutting and plugging and bending and gluing to make the wheel arms more straight than the rest, and hid it all behind the bogie cover.
A shout out to my old Army buddy and still friend 32 years later, Steve R., for the green sticky putty that was ESSENTIAL for attaching plastic/photo etch to resin on the turret. Thanks for the advice bud, it worked great!
It worked well enough for me that I figured I might eventually have a decent Jumbo on the display shelf in the workshop.
SO FAR...I have primed and painted a base coat on it. I have also done a little bit of color modulation, with various pieces having slightly different colors and I have, as I have before, post shaded all edges and protrusions with a shade darker on the base coat (raw Tamiya XF-62). I now just need to go back over it with base color (off shaded) and thin up the post shading to make is less edgy. My base coat (Olive Drab) by the way is what I call Zaloga OD (again after my hero Steve Z.), which is Tamiya XF-62 OD/Tamiya XF-60 Dark Yellow in a 60/40 mix. I use an empty Tamiya bottle to make alot of it so that I can get a consistent color over many painting sessions.
A note on the painting. Based on the results from another friend, Chris J., I used Tamiya laquer thinner (yellow cap) with Tamiya acrylic paint instead of Tamiya acrylic thinner and used an even lower compressor setting (10-12 PSI) and the finish is in my opinion much nicer. I used to get a pebbley effect before but this is MUCH smoother. This was with a Paasche Model H airbrush for large things like primer and base coat - Badger 200 for finer detail stuff later.
What looks like chain link fence on the side of the hull and turret - is chain link fence (actually something called Tulle from Michael's craft store). They called it Sommerfield matting and it is used to poke foliage (that fancy for branches) to hold it for camouflage. My hero Steve Z. did it to his, so... I think there is a great opportunity to do some paint chipping and rusting techniques on it. Can't wait.
Here is progress so far:
Sooooo, yeah, Why take 1?
Well, as I was getting into this and had my money spent (more than I figured going in..).......Tasca comes out and does this. And guess what I got for Fathers Day?
Sigh.
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