A little Sherman madness

I haven't touched the Cromwell since my last post. I've been waiting for the AB Figures to arrive from England. before I finish it. The figures arrived Tuesday (I only sent my order in via Air Mail 10 days before!), and I picked them up at the Post Office Friday. I went a little crazy and order a bunch of US and British tanker sets, since my stash of allied kits is quite large. I'll try and shoot some pictures and send to On the Way! as previews, since they're celebrating 10 years on the web. Then I'll pick four figures for the Cromwell, paint them up and at least have the Tank finished.

Today also brought a package from Luck Models, with six decal sheets from Bison. Unfortunately two sheets were out of stock (US Shermans in Normandy, and US Tanks in NW Europe '45), but I can get to work on several other kits, mostly British Shermans. So the AB Figures will come in handy.

My wife and I have been camping several weekends over the summer, and I've taken various kits to work on when we aren't hiking, all Dragon Shermans (Firefly Vc, M4A1 76mm, M4A3 105mm, and M4A1 75mm). It allows me to do the gross assembly, and keeps me from going too nuts with the after market stuff. The Vc will probably be a Kiwi Firefly from Italy, I still have to look over the Bison decal options for one that tickles my fancy. Overall it's been a very nice kit to build, with only the 3 piece drive housing offering any trouble. I've added a cast texture to the drive and turret using liquid cement.

I've also done a little more work on the M4A1 76mm by Dragon. It's almost ready to prime, just needs the photo-etch parts added.

I've been working on the M4A1 75mm most recently, over the Labor Day camping trip. I can't say it's my favorite Dragon Sherman. Dragon included a cast texture that was too heavy and course for my taste, but fortunately only required a few minutes with some wet/dry sand paper to subdue to a more realistic texture for 1/72 scale. I'm leaning towards using the kits decals and building it as "Derby." As near as I can tell, you can build it out of the box with what in the kit (correct running gear), although there is some question as to whether it had open spoked or solid spoked road wheels (a result of several hours of google searches, and paging through various Concord Sherman books...I sad and pathetic I know).