Friday 6 September 2013

Sherman Flail turrets and this weeks painting

This week, I have been mostly painting gun and vehicle crews...


However, one of the things I've been thinking about recently while painting has been the addition of the canvas covers commonly seen around the gun mantlets of Sherman Flails in the NWE theater to my Sherman Crabs.

Example can be seen below (model by rct75001)

Picture from http://rctlittlesoldiers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/sherman-flail-on-d-day.html - a fantastic blog and I only wish I could get my models to this standard!
This has been an effect that's been pretty hard to get in 15mm. I've tried two different techniques so far, one using tissue soaked in PVA and water and the other using green stuff.

The first step was to remove the late model wide gun mantlet that I had used previously. It was too large to work under any sort of cover. Many of the pictures I had seen online had the flails with the earlier narrow style mantlet (as seen here).

In order to get the fitting right, I discovered I would need to file the Battlefront provided early mantlet down a bit to make it less prominent on the front of the tank.


My first attempts didn't look quite right...

Not quite right...
So with a bit of trimming and a few more squints at reference pictures I got to this:




Which seems a much closer fit than my first attempts! I also trimmed down the other version so the same sort of size as the green stuff one.


So that's the work in progress! Let me know what you think!


3 comments:

  1. Not bad and a nice addition. Good work sir.

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  2. Thanks Dai, I've not stripped the second version and I'm going to do them both in green stuff. The idea had been the wet paper would look like canvas, but it didn't really turn out. The green stuff option will hopefully look better when painted.

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  3. Nice first try, In almost everything practice makes perfect. Walking through mine fields may be the exception. Pro create works really good as unlike green stuff it can be sanded.

    Still very good though.

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