3. The Bodge Job

  The lower and upper hull parts are Tamiya items taken from their Sherman M4A3E8 kit, which in itself is not a bad kit to be honest, but many years ago when I first started this project the lower hull got badly bodged with some less than ideal changes that seemed to mostly involve me layering thin plastic card to the hull sides, this was really not a good idea, and will cause problems later on...

 But anyway, the engine bulkhead wall is a mixture of Tamiya and Tasca items, which has then been added to with plastic card, the holes in the bulkhead wall are not correct for the M4A3 HVSS 105mm I don't think, but I'm not gonna worry too much about that, the engine access door also got thickened up a bit and glued in the open position as that's how it is on the real thing.

  Pictures below, I tried to think of a smart way to do the flaked out armour plate patches on the hull sides, but couldn't really think of anything smart (lol) so just bodged it by facing on some thin plastic card, It doesn't really matter all that much that this adds thickness to the hull sides as it is all going to get covered with many layers of texture and paint, model accuracy is very low on the list of priorities to be honest

  You know things are turning into a bodge job when things from the kitchen start appearing on your model making bench, in this case a mortar n pestle that has never actually been used for its intended purpose as far as I'm aware, so it might as well get used to create some very fine sandy coloured dust.

  And while on the subject of things not being used for their intended purpose, I have also purchased some very fine naturel wool roving (whatever that is) from my local Hobby Craft shop, I have absolutely no idea what its intended purpose is, but it might be useful for doing the stringy texture of the seaweed/slime/algae nonsense that is on the front plate, who knows...

 Next up is hopefully some work on the Sherman M4A3 105mm HVSS wheels and suspension, and again this will be a mixture of Tamiya and Dragon parts, so in effect I'm kit bashing two kits together because it just happens to work out easier that way, and I had both of the kits in my model stash.

 Matt