US album1 - M5 HST

"A British boy drives alongside an American M5 artillery tractor in his pedal car and greets the soldiers. The troops have assembled in a English port town ahead of the D-Day landings." 

A view from further down the same street on that day. 

Definitely won't be using the kit 'decals' (actually stickers)! 

A quick "dry" assembly with Blu-tack of the main structure to figure out what goes where. The instructions, both visual and written, are almost entirely useless. Some of the translations are entertaing though! Looks like main parts shoulf fit together well, must try not to stick the driver's seat back upside down as I have it here though 🙂 

The kit's front sproket drives don't bear much resemblance to the real thing. A search in the spares box produced a couple of unmade M4 Sherman sproket drives (no idea what manufacturer) which have the right "Fancy Smooth" style sprocket teeth but the wrong style centre. I'm going to have a go at seeing if I can combine the two to create something near enough to the M5's... 

Drilled and sanded out the Sherman's wheel. 

The wheel centre proved a bit trickier. Trimmed and sanded of outer teeth okay. Adding bolts from stretched sprue proved tricky - not sure I have found the right glue / technique yet. Picture shows third attempt at securing sprue for one off the bolts. Needs to be secure enough to trim and sand when dried... 

Ho-hum. Really wasn't happy with what I achieved the first time with the sprocket. You can certainly tell it's a long time since I've attempted this kind of stuff! I might have got away with something that clunky at my previous preferred scale of 1:35 when I last battled with scalpel and cement many, many years ago. But at braile-scale definately not! So I had another rummage in the goodie bag of dead plastic and dug out a half-built old Stuart tank (Matchbox?) which was fairly easily 'de-sprocketed'. Stretched myself some thinner sprue rod and had another go. Results, after much fighting with various adhesives, are a bit better, well less embarrassing at least. Going to drill out the first attempt again... 

In the mean time the M10 from MR Modelbau has arrived 🙂 Very nice, couple of bits to sort out as is the way with resin stuff, but some nice fine detail and pretty acurate it seems. 

And I have recruited a candidate sergeant. That other arm is going to have to go, now where did I put that razor saw... 

The sides of the main body of the trailer curved in a bit. This was pretty easy to fix - I put the body in hot water for 20 seconds or so and then took it out and pushed the kit's block of trailer cargo in to place and left it all to cool. Just in case, as I'm going to cover the trailer anyway, I glued a piece of 1mm plastic card in there to prevent it warping back. 

I also had a problem with the rear flap of the trailer being warped. I tried hot water and manipulation a couple of times, but although it seemed fine when done by the next day it had bent again. So I glued some plastic card on the back after the last hot water and flexing treatment, thankfully that seems to have persuaded it to remain flat!