Sherman Mark Vc Firefly

First written: May 23rd, 2009 | Updated: June 25th, 2009

Olive Green at will

I’m going to do my first Sherman. And what better choice than a Tasca kit?

I bought this kit a while back and I had it in my hands many times but somehow there were always other build that got in front. This time is for real.

I have all the bits and pieces needed for the build including an Armorscale barrel, Bison decals en Panda Plastic tracks.

This version was the most powerful Sherman of WWII and resulted from the installation of the British 17 pounder gun. It had enough punch to knock out the German Tiger unlike other versions of the Sherman that needed to hit that tank on the least armored angles, namely the rear.

The problem was that while they were trying to do that, the 88mm gun of the Tiger would blow them away easily. It’s not by chance that they compared the Sherman to a Zippo. It lights at first time, every time. Not a good thing for the crews…

The Kit

The Tasca kit is a small wonder. Their quality is absolutely the best surpassing even Dragon in many respects. And now that the price on Dragon kits has rocketed, there’s no reason for not having the Tasca kits.

From the versions included with the kit I could not choose one and I always like to have a different model. I ordered a set of decals from Bison and I chose the tank I’m going to build.

Luckily on a 100 page special of Military Modelling there was an article dedicated to the unit and a very good picture of the tank can be seen. Immediately I understood that the tracks that the decal instructions indicate are wrong. From the picture above we can see that the tank is using the T62 track  instead of the T54E1 that the decal instructions indicate.

Nice catch, and even better because I had a set of Panda tracks waiting to be used on some model and they were precisely T62 tracks. This is a good omen (lol) being lucky twice in the same day is not very likely.

This particular tank has a storage box behind the armored radio box on the turret and I found two possibilities for getting this box. Formations makes a set in resin and Voyager makes a PE set that includes the boxes and a lot of PE for the tank. I decided to get the Voyager set also because I’ve heard good things from them but till now I just used Eduard and Aber sets and I was wanting to try other reputable brands.

Building

This is, as I expected, a wonderful kit to build. The precision of parts is really amazing.

The best example of that is the lower hull composed of 6 pieces that assembles like if it was a single piece of plastic. Nothing falls out of place, there is no need for adjustments and the final result is perfect.

The same thing with the engine deck panels that in spite of being 3 assemble with total perfection.

I have the turret ready and found out that the Armorscale mantlet and gun support are smaller than they should to fit the Tasca turret. I had to discard the beautiful resin parts from the Armorscale barrel and use the kit parts instead. I wonder in which kit are those parts supposed to fit. Dragon?

Those parts are awesome but the cast texture on the resin parts was clearly better.

The gun itself is very good and the muzzle is made of 4 parts that I assembled by soldering. The final result is perfect (no seams on the muzzle).

After fitting the barrel on the plastic parts I noticed how big this 17 pounder gun was. That thing was BIG.

The tracks from Panda plastics are also an excellent example of how a link by link track shoud be. They have very good detail and they assemble perfectly. The only problem is the amount of work needed to remove the sprue attachments from the smaller track connectors. And they are plenty..

The Voyager PE set

 

One of the reasons why this kit is taking so long is the excellent PE set from Voyager. At every step I decide not getting into trouble doing the boxes or the box locks. But then I can’t resist. So box after box I managed to do them all with the respective locks but at a very slow pace. Judge for yourselves.

There’s not much left to do (OE wise) so I’m planning painting very soon.

 

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