In an effort to represent all of the various power plants seen in the M4 Sherman, four of the kits in the book will have complete engine compartments. Unfortunately, many of the available aftermarket kits are for older kits and many of those are incomplete.
This is my basic M4A2 engine compartment. The grey parts are from the older TWS conversion kit for the Tamiya M4. The perforated areas (which are brass sheet) blend perfectly with the rest of the sidewalls.
The assemblies are designed to fit together without glue so that it can all be easily painted.
For those of you who visited the page we had set up on the site for the upcoming book, please note that it has been replaced with this blog. The images seen there will eventually reappear here with some additional content.
To create a direct vision M4A4, I first extracted the hood section from the Tasca DV M4A2. These welded assemblies required extensive reshaping to represent the cast type used on the M4A4 (and M4A3). This was best done off the model.
Once completed, this was positioned on the hull using a brass i-beam "sleeper." Much filling sanding later created this result:
As the M4A4 was Tasca's first Sherman, it was missing much of the finer weld bead detail. This was added along with the many markings inherent to the DV parts.
Because I was eventually going to build more than one DV M4A4 and because I wasn't going to do this again—the hull ended up becoming a master pattern for a Tiger Model Designs kit. You can find it here: http://www.thenewtmd.com/M4A4-Upper-Hull
I thought this was a good idea: take the Resicast M4A1 DD kit and mate it with the Tasca/Asuka M4A1 hull. Graham Seller of Resicast was nice enough to provide the kit even though he knew I was going to screw it up. I did try to add as many of his parts as possible. His skirt work is terrific and the support hardware is very comprehensive. Due to the differences between the original resin kit and the plastic one, it was necessary to do a lot of scratchbuilding. I also added a lot more stuff just for fun!
