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SLOW BURNER - IDF SHERMAN PLANS FINALLY SORTED.


Kingsman

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Thinking of doing "a few" IDF Shermans, I'd bought a stack of kits and parts in a fairly unstructured way - thinking I'd sort it out later.  Well moving house and thinning out the stash has made "later" = now.  So this is the build list I've settled on - given another lifetime to actually get round to it!

 

M1 VVSS cast hull (Dragon base)

M1 VVSS welded hull (Dragon base).  Yes there were about 10 of these, all radial engine.  None got HVSS as Supers.

M1 HVSS Super (Dragon base)

M50 VVSS early M4 Composite (Dragon base)

M50 VVSS early M4A4T (Dragon base)

M50 HVSS Cummins (OTB Dragon)

M50 HVSS Cummins SLA (Dragon, maybe open-top APC or mortar carrier conversion)

M60 Chilean M50 (Dragon with Buechler conversion)

M51 cast hull early radial (Dragon + DEF)

M51 cast hull late Cummins (OTB Academy)

M51 welded hull late Cummins (Academy cross-kit).  Yes, there were a small number of welded hull M51s.  They may have been the welded M1s that weren't converted into Supers.

M51 Chilean (Academy with Buechler conversion)

M32 ARV Cummins HVSS (Academy/Italeri cross-kit)

 

Oh, and a Lebanese Army VC Firefly with A2 engine conversion and glacis applique plate and an Argentine IC Hybrid Repotenciado.  Not strictly IDF but in very much the same vein.

 

Anyone think that 13 IDF Shermans is a few too many and that I might need some serious therapy help?  That's what comes of reading Tom Gannon's excellent book.  I suppose I could thin out the 3 "usual suspects" (vanilla Dragon M50, Academy M51 and VVSS cast hull M1) and concentrate on the less usual variations.

 

 

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I'd love to do one of those but it's way beyond my building skills.  Same with the Puma RAM.  Pretty much everything on it needs to be fabricated.  No common parts with the M74, unsurprisingly as IDF didn't have any.

 

The dark recesses of my mind think that AEF Designs used to do a Gordon/Trailblazer conversion (I thought it was Trailbreaker?) but if they did it was damn expensive and AEF's quality got very variable write-ups.  Maybe Legend will turn their attention to it.  They have a penchant for IDF in a way that no-one else really does.

 

Underneath it all is a small-hatch M4A1 hull, so a tank originally built in 1942 or 43!  Now there's recycling in action...........  You might think a welded hull would have been a better fit for all the external boxes etc, but they were always in a minority.

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