M3 Lee
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Kevin Thiele added a new project.
The turret will be the most difficult because of all the compound curves. I was planning to do it in layers of styrene, add putty to smooth then hollow it out with a dremel. Also looking at Patton style tanks for a similar turret and then copying it with a resin mould. Interesting project!
For compound curves, you might find it useful to look at some of the techniques used by gunpla scratch-builders, i.e. making profiles from styrene to define shapes, then putty to fill gaps
Thanks for that, I dont even know what gunpla is, but there's Google.
I've done construction with all well known techniques, and a couple that aren't known. Depends upon your confidence level and how much you want to be faithful to the plans. A lamination can hit the profile perfectly, but applying the putty (2 part epoxy?) and sanding it smooth is very labour intensive. Building a rough profile with frames (like a balsa wood model) and filling that with epoxy also works, but has the same labour intensive problem of sanding it smooth. From then picture I'm looking at, I would build a profile with frames, but *skin* the the profile with 15 thou sheet, because what I see is a frustum (truncated cone) for the upper, a step, and an upside down frustum for the lower, which could be a lamination. Wish I had converted this photo album to scale mates, but it's here for the time being, hope it gives you ideas on how to scratch out your turret:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=ajmadisonmodels&set=a.323441348115164
AJ, this is amazing work! Sort of the next step of the kind of thing I was thinking of.
Thanks AJ, that was exactly the information I needed. I can now move ahead confidently. Making the turret in 3 sections with the bottom virtually a mirror of the top, and using ribbing with a 0.15in sheet skin seems the way forward. I have crude plans and photos but they will be adequate. I will use some of the M3 Lee kit parts (it was the original inspiration for the tank, although heavily modified) in the detail. The War Thunder image (main photo) seems very close to actual photos and I can get any angle I need from the game.
Jakko added a new photoalbum.
Guessing what tank it is was kind of fun, though my knowledge about tanks barely qualifies as superficial.
Thanks, all 🙂
@Dave Flitton: I wonder what they made the additional stuff out of. Plywood would be easiest, I would think, but then why add all those rivets? Maybe to blend it in with the real part of the tank, I suppose. Though I have this feeling the whole thing was made of sheet steel. (Which also wouldn't need the rivets, or at least not ones this big …)
@Michael Osadciw: yes, it's definitely one of those typical wartime training videos that really have this very American/Hollywood tone to them. There used to be comments under this video on YouTube, but they were disabled sometime after I started this model; anyway, many of those said pretty much the same you did 🙂 (Oh, and did you know Ronald Reagan used to make films in this genre during the war?)
Thanks. I don't think I'd have believed this tank existed either without some proof to back it up 🙂
