US album1 - M5 HST and M10 trailer

"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. 

And an other (life goes on...). 

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 sprocket wheel. 

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. 

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

At the rear of the trailer the very thin side-light panels haven't cast successfully. Easy to remedy with the addition of some thin plastic card. Which also helped to disguise the repair to the piece of bumper I broke off shortly after taking this photo... 

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 now! 

The frame shape is a bit off, it should be easy enough to cut a small slice out of the two frame sides near the front to compensate. The trailers 'jockey wheel' assembly in the kit is in the extended standing mode. The kit does include another piece of the lower half of the stand as a separate part, the idea being presumably to cut out the extended lower part and replace it with this to show the assembly folded as I want. As it's a bit lumpy and misshapen I decided to scratch the parts from plastic card. What could go wrong? (Well that jockey wheel is upside down now for a start off...) 

Of course when I start looking at pics for build reference I find the jockey wheel assembly isn't as simple as the kit has it. So... it was only after a lot of discarded bent bits of brass wire, brass strip, time spent (never enough!) and a fair bit of swearing that I ended up with something I was happy with. Some parts are rather over-scale, but I was just happy to have managed to represent it even half-way accurately in the end! Also added from wire lifting handles, a lunette lock lever from thinner wire, and cables for the brake levers, from even thinner wire.  

I started thinking about the canvas trailer cover. There are a lot of hooks on the trailer body to secure the cover rope, seventeen in total. With the cover hanging over the top sill of the trailer body these gave a distinctive look to the covered trailer. The kit versions don't look much like the original and are very fragile. So I decided to replace them with wire hooks bent to shape but glued in drilled holes to make them more secure . As I intend to thread the cover using model-boat rigging thread (no idea exactly how/if that will work yet!) I reckoned it would be a good idea to have them nice and secure. So I used stiff wire. Thing about stiff wire is if it's bent backwards and forwards very much it will snap. So that put a premium on getting it right first time when shaping the wires. Okay... Well I reckon I broke three of the damn things for each success! So that's fifty or so goes - that took up a few happy evenings... 

Finally got to the stage where paint seemed like the next step. A quick thin coat of rattle-can Mr Surfacer revealed a multitude of sins. It really does help "see" the thing when it's more-or-less one colour. Added some thin plastic triangles to the hand brakes to look more like the originals, a little bit of extra detail to the box catches and to the lunette lock release. And some filler and sanding here and there. 

After some more scraping, filling and sanding of the, suddenly alarmingly obvious(!), visible seams and imperfections it got a second coat from the can. Better, but still needs work... 

Couldn't resist adding a couple more details. Not a great photo, but the two black dots on the drawbar are bolt/rivet heads from an Archer 3d decal sheet. They seemed a bit of an irregular shape on the sheet but they look better when applied. They went on pretty easy with help from some VMS Set & Soften. Also added a couple of leads from the tail lights. Did the first in copper wire, which was bloody fiddly, and the second in lead wire which involved a lot less swearing! Of course it would have been altogether easier if I had decided to add them before, rather than after, the light holders I made from brass strip! 

The last bit of 'detailing' actually involved removing stuff. The tail-gate includes a couple of reflectors which I couldn't find in any reference pics, so I shaved those off with a chisel blade. Lots of tidying up still to do before painting...