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

4. Everything Now

 One advantage of using the Dragon M4A3 105mm kit is that the wheels and tyres are moulded as separate parts, this was considered as completely stupid many years ago, but turns out to be a very useful thing indeed for this build, the Dragon plastic also seems to be very brittle (poor quality) which seems to make it better for destruction work, feathering edges and things like that, it just seems to be easier to work with when compared with the Tamiya wheels.

 Picture below, this just shows how the separately moulded tyres can work to your advantage when doing a rusty wreck such as this, it makes it much simpler to replicate tyres that have broken up and lost sections in chunks, plus they can be set so as they look like they are breaking away from the wheel itself, most of the wheels were butchered to within in an inch of their life, very heavy damage to be honest, and a couple of Tamiya wheels had to be used in the end.

 Picture below, the HVSS (Highly Volatile Silly Suspension) has also been attacked with a Minicraft tool fitted with a very small rotary bur, the front set of wheels is not finished yet because I'm still a little undecided on how to make them look, I'll probably go with smaller more heavily destroyed wheels, and it has to said that if you are doing a rusty tank wreck then it's probably best not to pick something with lots and lots of small wheels, because it can get a bit boring grinding and destroying the wheels, It really does seem to take forever.

 The hull itself still needs texture adding to the sides, and some rusty rotted out sponsons need to be added at some point, or in other words, It's a long way from finished yet, plus a very basic interior needs to be added at the front under the crew hatches, (more great big open holes that you can see through) which means I need to scratch a very basic transmission at some point, plus lots of metal junk and stuff to fill up the inside a bit to stop it looking so empty inside, the engine compartment just has a part of the drive shaft laying in it as far as I can see, and not much else.

 Like a complete fool I glued some of the suspension parts to the hull which was a very bad mistake this early in the build to be honest because I still haven't decided on how exactly I'm going to paint the damn thing, whether to do all the rust with an airbrush, or whether to use a stipple brush painting method, but anyway, It wasn't a good idea to glue them just yet.

 Matt

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

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

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