Turret and the rest are ready! (Patreon)

My friends, I finished the turret and did an unexpected swap of the tracks! 

First, let's talk about the tracks. I contemplated these 3D printed tracks from Panzerwerk but when I had them in my shopping cart, I thought they'd arrive too late, so I decided to go with the rubber bands for reasons I mentioned previously. But then Panzerwerk reached out and after a couple of messages, the tracks were on their way and arrived yesterday! But it wasn't just the fast service, the assembly was equally fast. I was intimidated, because Sherman tracks aren't the simplest, and 3D printed resin can be quite brittle, but I'll be damned, this was so much fun. They nicely click together just as the provided instructions say, and in slightly more than 2 hours I had both runs assembled with a quite a few links to spare. 

First we had no sag with the DS tracks, now we have a little bit of sag! The truth should be somewhere in between these two extremes, and even photos of King Kong show a bit of sagging, but the best approach would be to keep the idler wheel positionable and adjust the sag and amount of links for the perfect result. Because I've already glued the idler with huge amounts of Mr Cement S, I don't want to undertake such surgery and instead I'll be happy with these detailed, functional tracks :) 

Now for the turret, this was a rather simple job. Add the texture by scraping with a knife, stipple with glue, sand, stipple with Tamiya putty, sand again, add the casting seam and welds. Oh, let's not forget those "bubbles" on the rear of the turret, the same effect I added to my T29! These were done with superglue. Then just add some plastic details, PE, build the cupola, and fit the figure. The figure was a small project on its own and fitting it into the cupola took some effort! Also, the commander had quite a few bubbles on him, and I filled these with black VMS superglue. I also added a bunch of foundry markings according to museum photos. The "placard" on the roof of the turret was done by masking the area and stippling more Tamiya putty on top of it. 

The antenna base 3D model was kindly provided to me by RSR Models. Also, I didn't have another metal 30cal barrel in my stash, so I had to use the plastic one from Dragon :( Luckily, not much of it is visible. 

The last step is to add some stowage and it'll be finally ready for painting!!!