5. Memories of Green

 Now is a good time to completely murder the whole of the Tamiya upper hull with the same Minicraft tool and small rotary bur that was used on the suspension, the upper hull badly needs some fairly extreme texture adding to it, which can then be improved further with stippled coats of Mr Sufacer and some other fairly extreme methods of creating texture that will become clear later...

 Pictures above and below, after gluing a few bits on, it all got murdered with the rotary bur and then lightly brushed with a bit of Tamiya Extra Thin just to take the harshness out of it, all of the part locator holes got filled in with various stuff, plastic card and filler, not that it really matters all that much, as it's all going to get covered in more Mr Surfacer500 and other stuff to create more of a random chaotic rusted texture, some tea leaves might even make an appearance at some point...

 Picture below, now things are starting to look really gnarly and horrible, which is a good thing for a change, and it's probably going to get a lot worse yet, some more chunky texture needs to be added I think in random places on the hull sides and the hull front, just to make it look a little more gnarly and nasty, the remains of the track guard brackets have also been added to the hull sides at the bottom, which then also got murdered, and I'm not sure why I left the hull sides in bare white plastic, there was probably a reason.

 Picture below, my Minicraft tool is starting to feel the strain and is not long for this world I don't think, he seems to have decided that 'variable speed' is something that he personally will regulate depending on his mood at any given point in time, and I can't say I blame him, I feel very much like that most of the time these days to be honest, I have a back up Dremel but I'm not keen on it to be honest, even on very low speed it has very fast rpm, and with one slip it murders everything in its path.

 Picture below, the rusted remains of the phone box? That's on the right hand side of the backplate has been added using thin plastic card, I have no idea what it was for, maybe a phone box so the supporting infantry can talk to the tank crew while it's all buttoned up? The back end still needs quite a bit of work to be honest, there's a big lump of plastic that needs grinding out, and the rusted remains of the sponsons need to be added, I can't use the kit parts, so I'll probably scratch those from very thin card, which will then be easier to replicate a rusted through look.

 Picture below, there's still a lot of surface texture to be added to this, mostly on the hull sides and various parts of the turret, I need to add more random crazy looking lumps of rusty corrosion, but I'm still undecided on how exactly to do it (more on that later) The Mr Surfacer 500 is mainly there for texture, but also so that PVA glue will stick to the model easily, or in other words, it's actually there for a good reason this time, unlike another build of mine that I won't mention.

 Picture Below, things that still need to be done - the hull bottom doesn't fit the hull top very well, so needs sorting, a big chunk of plastic needs to be removed from the lower hull at the rear, the wheels need still need to be finished, rusty chaos texture needs to be added to the hull and turret, junk needs adding inside to fill up the empty space, maybe half a length of track for one side, and the remains of the loaders hatch pivot needs adding to the turret, then maybe I can hit it with a black pre shade coat, maybe...

 For some strange reason I seem to be collecting grey and white Sherman's, I'm not really sure why, but things just seem to end up looking like this at some during my builds, but at least one of them looks nice and pretty, and the other one looks gnarly, nasty and horrible, though it does have to said that the M4A3 HVSS 105mm has far more chance of actually getting finished sometime soon.

 Matt