2. The Dragons' Den

 The turret is an old Dragon item from their M4A3 HVSS 105mm kit (which is hard to get now) It got slated at the time for having an incorrect gun mantlet I think, either too big or too small, I can't remember now, but stuff like that doesn't matter for this build, the gun mantlet has already been covered in large amounts of ca and baking powder, so who cares? The Aber metal barrel got attacked with a large hacksaw and cut down to a nice stubby length, the pistol port is left hanging open as per the real thing, and the commanders hatch has been butchered to within an inch of its life, the plan was to cover the whole turret with ca and baking powder for a very rusty and corroded look, but that plan has changed.

 Picture above, one of the first jobs on the list of things to do for the Dragon turret is to scratch a very basic gun breach from laminated card and plastic tube, the turret has no hatches anymore, they have all rotted away, so the view into the turret interior is quite open, so we need a very basic gun breach just fill up the empty space a little, doesn't need to be anything fantastic, or that accurate for that matter, just needs to look vaguely like a Sherman 105mm gun breach.

 Pictures above, the very basic Dragon turret ring (all old kits tend to be like this) needs to be enlarged quite a bit because there are quite a few large holes in the top of the turret, so you can easily see inside, so the turret ring needs to look a little more correct, some white card is added to act as a mounting point for a scratched gun breach that will be added later, plus some texture has been added to the inside face of the turret.

 Picture below, a close up of the ca/baking powder trick that has been applied to the gun mantlet, It gives a very realistic chaos corrosion kind of effect that I tend to like a lot, and the plan was to do the whole turret like this, but that plan changed, and instead the turret will be layered with various stippled coats of Mr Surfacer 500.

 Picture below, the turret with various layers of stippled Mr Surfacer 500 which tends to create a complete mess which is exactly what is needed for this build to be honest, more layers of harsher texture will be added at a later point, the purpose of this is just to provide a good starting point, PVA glues for instance will stick much better to a primer coat than they will to bare plastic, which might or might not be helpful later on...

 And that's pretty much the turret prepped and ready to go, It still needs the remains of the loaders hatch adding to those two stubs on the turret roof, which is something I missed while messing around with all the destruction based modelling, but it's easy enough to sort out later on, work on the Tamiya upper and lower hull is next on the long list of jobs that need doing.

 Matt