1. The Culebra Beach Wreck

 Sitting on a beach, Culebra Beach, Puerto Rico to be exact, there is a very curious tourist attraction in the form of an ex Marines M4A3 HVSS 105 Sherman, which is slowly rusting away and covered in green seaweed and slime, plus large amounts of graffiti for most of the year, she tends to get a new coat of graffiti with every new tourist season I think, and therefore changes in appearance quite a lot, I have a sneaky feeling that there's a beach bar close to where she sits in the sand, plus, there's a great deal of pictures online now of this tank wreck, due to it being a popular tourist spot, which is very handy for projects like this, but anyway, I think the above picture would make a good little vignette, and it does have to be said that painting is not my strong point, so this could go south very quickly indeed, luminous green seaweed is not in my skillset.

 A little history on this particular M4A3 HVSS 105mm Sherman and how it came to be sat on a beach in the Caribbean, and this is all based on snippets of information gleaned from the internet so it's probably not entirely correct, but here goes anyway, during World War II the Americans had some bases on the islands around Puerta Rico, these bases were mainly used for testing purposes and as firing ranges for the duration of the war, most of the bases were maintained for quite a long time after the war, right up until around 1973 (ish) They were then shut down and abandoned, due mainly to protests from the locals I think? And when the Americans abandoned all the bases, for reasons unknown they left behind two or three ex Marine M4A3 HVSS 105's, which have been slowly rusting away in the sunshine and sea air ever since.

 

 Pictures above and below, this seems to be the most popular style of graffiti, judging by the pictures online, or at least this is how it was painted at some point in the past, and then more layers of graffiti were painted over this, and as far as I can tell the interior of the tank is pretty much fully gutted out, there's no engine left in the engine bay, just a load of old rusted metal and junk, but I'm guessing there's probably the remains of a transmission in the front, and probably a gun breech still in the turret, so I need to hunt more pictures.

 

 Pictures below, there is at least an option to model this without the green seaweed, which is a good thing to be honest because that's probably the hardest part to do, so I can always take the easier option and just rust on the front plate, plus some graffiti on the turret and hull sides maybe, but it does have to be said that the green seaweed is what kind of makes the first picture so appealing, well, for me at least anyway, It takes this rusty old Sherman M4A3 105mm and turns it into something very curious and interesting to look at.

 

 Pictures below, this is as far as I got with the project about six years ago when I decided to just mess around with various forms of destruction on two old plastic kits that I had knocking around in the kit stash, the turret is a Dragon part and the hull is from Tamiya, plus an Aber metal barrel for good measure, there's also some very crude use of plastic card to create the areas where the armour plate has flaked away in big chunks on the hull sides, but apart from that I didn't get very far with it, the prospect of green seaweed and slime scared me half to death to be honest.

 The plan is to have another go at this rusty old wreck of a Sherman tank and see if I can get a little further with it this time, or at least get some paint on the damn thing this time, there's a 50/50 chance of it getting finished maybe, but even if it doesn't get finished I will at least learn a few things with regards to painting and weathering rusty old tank wrecks along the way, so let's see what happens...

 Matt