One of the nice things about PSC kits is you get masses and masses of spare parts on the sprues, in some cases, enough to build complete extra vehicles. I have ludicrous numbers of Shermans, from a range of manufacturers, but predominantly from PSC , so I also have a ludicrous number of spare Sherman bits.
I have many, many more sprues like this. These are from the US Tank Company box, so have 75mm, 76mm and 105mm turret options. I also have some turret bits left over the British tank box, although fewer of those.
I recently had a bit of a Sherman clearout (getting rid of half a dozen) , but felt I didn't have enough Firefly turret options for the British, so rather than buy yet more Shermans, I just thought I'd do another Firefly turret.
It was going to be a bit of a mongrel, with bits from various sprues and my bits box. Fortunately I still had one 17pdr barrel and external mantlet in stock (the other 17pdr barrels have been used in other projects). I also had a Firefly turret top, but no base, fortunately the US turret sprue has turret bases for both 75mm and 76mm turrets, and the turret base from the 75mm turret fitted perfectly. I was also able to use a spare 75mm mantlet interior to mount the 17pdr barrel.
Not looking too bad! The hatches are a bodge however. I don't have any spare Sherman split hatch turret mounts, although I do have some spare split hatches. I do however have some 76mm turret hatch mounts, so I had to file one of those down to fill the hole in the turret, then glue the moulded split hatch on top.
I also found a small rectagonal hatch (maybe from a Battlefront kit?) which fitted the Firefly loaders hatch OK. They both stand a little proud but I think they will be OK.
The last thing was to put a large turret box from the spares pile on to act as a counterweight, which gives it more of a Firefly look.
The final thing was, would the (cast hull) US turret base fit the hole in the (Welded Hull) British hull? PSC really likes to vary its hull/turret fittings in a bewildering variety, but fortunately on this occasion it did, with only a tiny bit of filing required.
Great, that just needs painting now.
And here it is with its paint job, plonked on a 75mm Sherman hull. I did it with VJ Russian Uniform with a heavy wash of Bronze Green and a bit of a drybrush.
It doesn't look bad at all. The only obviously wrong thing is that the hull MG hasn't been blanked out.
And the counterweight looks OK. Although the turret is a slightly different shade to the hull, that doesn't really matter, as a lot of these were new turrets retrofitted onto existing hulls anyway.
It is a very good match for a 'proper' one. I'd have made up some Firefly turrets from the original sprue, but you don't get enough of the turret bases for that (unlike the T34 sprue where you can make up both the 76mm and 85mm turrets), so I was grateful for for the 105mm/75mm/76mm sprue which included bases for both types of turret.
Great, another useful model done, and which only requires storing the spare turret and not an entire hull.
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