Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all enjoy this time of year and get some fun stuff to play with in your xmas stockings. Many thanks to my readers for their support through the year.
The relentless post backlog stops for no-one and nothing however, and regular readers may recall I picked up a handful of second hand tanks at the Other Partisan back in October.
And here they are again... Two Zvezda Matildas IIs and a metal M5 Stuart which I'm pretty sure is a Skytrex one. They have all been hastily spray painted green, the gun barrels painted gunmetal and some black blobbed on the tracks. They haven't even been undercoated, and bits of bare metal or plastic show through in the undercuts.
Still, for the price, I'm not complaining.
The Stuart is a nice little model. It is the same size as my B3D M8 Scott, a bit bigger than my QRF M3s and a lot smaller than the oversized PSC M5s. An added bonus is that the turret pops off to reveal a nice internal cavity, so it will easily convert to a recce turretless 'jalopy' Stuart.
It just needs a bit of cleaning up and a repaint.
The Matildas are both pretty plain. I needed another desert one for my planned Operation Battleaxe game, so I thought I may as well clutter one up. I had originally planned to (rather reluctantly) repaint one of my BEF Matildas, but doing another desert one seems more sensible.
The metal fuel tank is from a QRF Valentine (I think) but the mounting lugs on the tank fit perfectly in the fuel locator slots on the rear engine deck. Maybe they were a standard size?
The tarpaulin stowage roll on the turret is a filed down PSC plastic Russian fuel tank (!) and the rack of water cans on the left lower track guard is converted from a spare low profile Sherman turret bin.
My attempts to build a smoke discharger array on the right hand side of the turret largely failed thanks to my fat fingers, but I trimmed down a bit of sprue and stick that on so there is at least 'something' there.
I left the other Matilda plain, I'm going to do it as a Russian Lend Lease Matilda.
I did notice unsightly join lines along the top of the track guards and I was just fiddling around to work out how to fill it and they both fell to bits! They'd obviously just been pushed together, and not very well. In theory all the Zvezda models are push fit, but my experience of assembling dozens of them is that you need to glue them.
So, lots of glue later, I wrapped them in tape to hold them together while they set. I expect I'll still have to fill, but hopefully not as much. I remembered the gap was a problem with the other Zvezda Matildas I'd built, but I'd forgotten.
While I was fiddling around, I also re mounted the turret Vickers MG on my Marmon Harrington Mk II. It now points the same way as on my Mark III! I'll just need to touch up the paint where I detached it. The bare patch looks pretty obvious in the photo.
And while I was at it, I replaced the Matilda coax MGs with 0.5mm brass rod. They were falling off anyway (something else I remember from building some of these before).
Righto, next up is painting.
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