Wow! Fantastic progress, my friend @lgardner! Great that you fitted the correct cupola and I loved your scratch built sponsons! The Sherman looks excellent so far!

George R Blair Jr (@gblair)

First off, thank you for the compliments on the second Sherman. I am amazed and also very happy with just how fast these kits have been coming together.
Yes I have been thinking about what you said and you are absolutely correct. With my background as a real life “tanker” one would think that I would build more armored kits. Lately I have been doing just that. I have several different tanks and some wheeled vehicles that are getting very close to being done.

My heart has always been in aviation though. I believe that is why I continue with building more aircraft than armor vehicles.

As far as the diorama goes, I originally wasn’t going to build anything for this project. If I were to build something it would have had to be huge, and it would have probably take up a portion of our backyard in order to make it look realistic as far as the size / scale of things.

So I think I might just try to build some sort of photographic base that will consist of a cobblestone street with a set of rail tracks running along it as the base. Then I’ll attempt to make some walls for buildings in a Hollywood TV production filming prop style. These would probably not be connected to the base, but they would have a capability to be positioned in different configurations and locations.

I basically just need a front wall. I think that I will try to mimic some of the buildings that are visible in the background of the original Cologne engagement film.

I will also construct several piles of rubble that will depict the ones that we see along the sides of the streets. These will also be moveable. So that I will be able to make it look like a different location by simply swapping the panels and rubble piles around to different locations.

Wish me luck ! This will be a first time attempt at doing something like this for me. I have made several photographic bases for my aircraft builds, but nothing anywhere nearly as complicated as this.

The second Sherman has had the turret painted ODG and has the interior painted with a Gloss White color. This is how the real thing was done.

I don’t have any pictures of it yet but I will take some and post them later on.

The final tank has been started.

I introduce to you the Panzer Mk IV.

I enjoy building armor for a change of pace. I’m especially fond of gluing them together and not having to worry about painting anything until later on.

This is what the road wheels look like when glued together. The Dragon / DML kit is from the early to mid 90’s and is designed to be built with the hatches closed. There is no interior included in the kit.

This allows for a faster build, and it reminds me of how I built kits up as a kid. Back then I would “slam them together” in a single afternoon.

I’m building these tanks at a much faster rate than I typically would be doing if they were aircraft.

However I have been taking the time to build them carefully enough to where they fit as they should and they are correctly assembled in the end.

This shows the lower hull and suspension system installed. The rear hull glacis and exhaust system have also been added.




These pictures show the upper hull being made. The fit is spot on and no gaps are found.

I couldn’t help myself from doing this. I had to place the upper hull on top of the lower portion. I wanted to make sure that it would fit perfectly and thankfully it did.

This was not permanent and I removed it shortly afterwards.

Here more details are added to the upper hull. It’s really starting to shape up now.


The turret was built next. The fit was again very nice. The tiny parts were time consuming and very fiddly. Things like the miniature lifting hooks and various other things were very trying for me, especially since I have fat fingers that don’t move as well as they once did. It doesn't help things at all with my up close vision not being what it once was too. The curse of Father time is catching up with me... along with multiple injuries over the years. I was not a couch potato for sure... Now I'm paying the Piper for my "youthful exuberance".

Another tricky part was adding the side skirts on the turret. This involved a lot of careful fitting and eventually worked out great. These side skirts were a prominent feature of the Mk IV J late version Panzer. This particular version also has a screen type wire mesh material that was used to defeat shaped charges on the sides of the hull.

The earlier versions of the H and J models used a solid steel plate for the skirting. Someone discovered the same thing could be done using less metal and also reducing the extra weight at the same time. You can see these lightweight / expanded metal skirts were also used on many other German armored vehicles, such as the Stug IV when we are talking about the Panzer Mk IV series chassis.

The Mk IV was the workhorse of the German armored units and were in service throughout the entire war.

The last thing I did was to temporarily position the newly constructed turret on the upper hull.

I wanted to see how it looked together.

More progress has been made. I’m going to be posting more updates later on as I can.

As always comments are encouraged.

Thanks for stopping by.

This is a really interesting project @lgardner, and you are doing some spectacular work here.

Excellent progress on the Panzer, my friend @lgardner!