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**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:04

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 19/03/2018 19:33:30)

So, onto the model. I’d bought myself AFV Club kit No.35288 Churchill Mk.IV AVRE w/Fascine Carrier Frame, which unfortunately turned out to have the wrong type of track, so I also needed their set No. 35183, Heavy Cast Steel Box Section Spudded Tracks/B.T.S 3 Heavy Built-Up Tracks for Churchill. With those ordered and delivered, I pretty much had what I needed for the model:

Following the instructions, I started with the sponsons. However, T69114/B had a whole bunch of rods on the side for stowing spare track links, as well as empty bolt holes where the centre sections of the track covers attached. That meant I had to drill a fair number of holes:

I worked out the distance between the holes and their approximate position using an AFV Club track link, then drilled them with a .5 mm bit. The idea is to insert .4 mm steel wire into them once most of the rest of the model is built (mainly because I don’t want to poke through my skin with that wire all the time when handing the model

). The eagle-eyed may spot I opened up one too many of the holes for the bolt heads on the left hull side; I filled that later, when I realised the mistake.

As for those bolts: pay attention with them if you also build an AFV Club Churchill, because there are actually two styles. One is completely conical (part E30), the other has two flats at the bottom of the cone (part E29). Because they’re side-by-side in the sprue, though, it’s not very obvious that these are actually different parts, so I found I had put on a mixture. Luckily I hadn’t glued them yet when I noticed.

The holes for the bolts for the centre track cover were somewhat difficult to locate correctly. I ended up taking the front and centre covers from the sprue and placing them onto the model, but in the end got them wrong a bit — as I again only found out later, when I actually got round to fitting them on the near-completed hull. To get the position right at this stage, the best way is to glue the rain channels above the doors. The centre track cover has a notch at its front that butts up against the rain channel, so if the latter is in place you can get the position of the cover right quite easily.

Next, the suspension. This looks like it will be a nightmare, with a separate metal spring for each wheel, but luckily if you put the spring around the inner part, you can clamp it to the sponson without any glue:

Just pull the spring down, hook the plastic part into the sponson, and let the spring go. Everything lines up nicely and you can add the other half of the sponson, then glue it. If you’re careful with the glue, the whole suspension remains movable.

Next, the wheels. I would advise deviating from AFV Club’s instructions and keeping the bit with two wheels separate from the long bit with nine wheels:

It’ll be much harder to line up correctly if you try gluing the two pieces together before inserting the suspension arms.

As for those: obviously it’s never going to work if you try to line up nine (let alone eleven) arms on one side, then add the other side. I found the best way was to put one arm on without glue, and then the other side strip. Next, I glued the transverse panel that sits between the two sides by that arm, and then hooked in the second wheel arm, glued the second panel, and so on until the end. Doing it this way, I must say I actually found it easier to build this 1:35th scale fully articulated Churchill suspension, than the one on the 1:76th scale Airfix Churchill …

All that remains then is to add the suspension arms to the sponsons:

This also isn’t as tricky as it seems, if you take a bit of care. I only had to clamp one of the four pieces to the sponson to get everything to sit correctly.

Once the glue had dried I put the wheels on (no pics of that) and once the hull was built, I glued the suspension in place, both inside the sponsons and at the pivots and bottoms of the arms. Putting the model onto a sheet of glass while the glue dried helped ensure everything is level.

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:05

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 19/03/2018 19:33:44)

At this point I skipped forward to the turret. As can be seen in the photo of the real tank, the commander’s hatch was open but the loader’s seems to have been closed. Other than the Petard mortar and Best machine gun, though, AFV Club provides no interior for the turret, so I had to scratchbuild something. I based this on the drawings of the interior in the old Tamiya book on the Churchill, as well as on official stowage drawings I found online.

The plastic sheet on the inside is there to bring the turret wall to more or less scale thickness (the Churchill’s turret side armour was 76 mm thick, the turret shell on the kit is about 1.5 mm, so it needed about half a millimetre more). I then just built some reasonable-looking parts from plastic card, copper wire, and a few bits and pieces from the spares box. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to look good when seen through the commander’s hatch. The following photo isn’t all that great, but it’s kind of hard to take a photo through that little hatch with an iPad

Because it’s fairly well visible through the hatch, I had built a hand grenade rack from plastic strip, basically by glueing two pieces into an L-shape and giving it six compartments with seven small squares of strip. Of course, after painting the interior I discovered a very good photo of the real thing, showing that what I have is pretty much totally wrong …

(source: The Churchill Tank Project, via the Wayback Machine)

But I can’t be bothered to change it now

I left out the radio on purpose. There is at least one photo of (presumably British) soldiers stripping parts from tanks in the village late in or shortly after the war, and post-war photos show all the Shermans with no periscopes (big round hole in the commander’s hatch), no antennae, etc. I reasoned that radios would have been taken as well, given their value to a military force. For the same reason I decided to leave out both the tank’s machine guns — I can’t be sure, as I don’t have photos of this Churchill that show the glacis plate, but I would expect them to have been removed either for use elsewhere or for public safety.

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:07

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 21/03/2018 18:18:53)

By now I’ve put most of the hull together, except for a number of the detail parts. After putting on the AVRE fittings, I noticed in the photo of the real tank that the pates with the lugs didn’t have bolts in circular surrounds — only the front plates with the curved rail had those.

Above is with the wrong bolts, below is after I cut them off and replaced them by the plain bolt heads without the bit of tube around them.

Luckily the mixture of bolt heads on this particular tank means there’s plenty of spares of the smaller ones :smiling3: (Though I only needed one.)

And a few photos of the hull with more of the detail parts on:

The front driver’s hatch is open in all the photos I’ve seen of this tank, but the rear one is shut. I decided to open the visor and the loader’s hatch slightly, mainly for interest. Same with the rear engine deck hatches: in the photo of the real tank I posted, the right one is all the way open and the left one is partly, but lacking an engine I decided to show them as having been opened and then shut again with the locking thingies (I can’t think of the proper name for these just now :smiling3

resting on the engine deck, thereby keeping the hatches open a little. I intend to have the bracing struts for them not neatly stowed either.

One of the square bits around the turret ring went flying off into oblivion the parts graveyard under my workbench, so it had to be replaced with some plastic card. The white bit by the right drive sprocket is the flange that the missing mudguards bolt onto:

Just a bit of .25 mm plastic card with the shape traced from the mudguard on the opposite side, then trimmed to fit and with .45 mm holes drilled.

The pencilled lines on the transmission deck are the locations of the clasps for the pioneer tools. Since the tools are missing in the tank in the photo (gee, I wonder why, in a village being rebuilt after having almost literally been bombed off the map … ) I’ll need to add the empty clasps, but I haven’t yet found a good photo of what they looked like.

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:09

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 23/03/2018 09:58:42)

I’ve added the hooks for keeping the engine deck hatches open:

Just 0.6 mm copper wire straightened out and given two right-angle bends, as this was easier than cleaning up the very delicate hooks that AFV Club provide.

I’ve also added the stuff on the hull rear plate, which meant building the lower parts of the smoke emitters from scratch, as they’re not just open but empty in most photos of the real tank:

This was the most annoying part of the build so far. Not only are the lower lids fiddly to build from 0.25 mm plastic card and a bit of 0.5 mm rod, but those etched locking handles are not easy to attach to the kit parts. Since AFV Club already provides for the smoke emitters to be in open or closed position, it would have been so much better if they had provided the lids and the smoke pots separately rather than moulded as one.

Anyway, on to other parts of the model! I found a photograph that shows the front of the tank I’m building on the web site of Stichting Cultuurbehoud Westkapelle (approx. “Foundation for Preservation of Cultural Heritage Westkapelle” ), which has a fair number of pictures of the village during the war, including many of (the aftermath of) the fighting. If you’re interested in that, take this link and click on either “2e Wereldoorlog en verwoesting” or “1940-1950”

(As another historical aside: notice that the tanks seem to be almost on the edge of the village. In fact, they’re in the middle of it, but everything behind the last houses in the photo was destroyed in the Allied bombing, collapsed due to being flooded twice a day for a year, and/or torn down after the war because it was just ruins.)

Anyway, finding this photo meant I finally have some details of the front of the tank, but as it’s not very big I couldn’t really make much out other than the spare track links on the turret and hull front. After e-mailing the foundation, though, and explaining that I’m building a model of that tank, I was sent a higher-resolution scan of this photo that let me see more.

One of things that made clear is that the tank has the left front track cover on. I had more or less assumed that everything except the last bit had been removed on both sides, but it now turns out that only those on the right were missing. It’s impossible to tell if the middle section was on, but after looking at photos of other AVREs at Westkapelle, my conclusion is that none seem to have landed with the middle section removed but the front section present. I duly added the necessary parts to the model, rejoicing somewhat that this means fewer track links to build (since I don’t particularly like the way the AFV Club heavy tracks go together).

You may also notice I left out the periscope heads. This isn’t because the kit provides them as clear parts that will be fitted after painting, but because I’m working on the assumption that those would have been removed. They were on the Shermans, so why would they have been left on the Churchill?

And the hull front with track links:

One thing can’t make out, though, is how they were held on. Were there metal rods on the hull front as well, or were these links welded onto the armour plate?

The headlights, incidentally, also won’t receive the clear parts. The photo of the real tank clearly shows there was no glass in them anymore, and incidentally also that I was right in thinking the Besa machine gun (and not, as autocorrect made it in one of my first posts, “Best machine gun” ) had been removed.

Now I just need to find the courage to build those tool brackets …

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:10

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 27/03/2018 15:28:15)

After some more work, I’m getting there. I’ve now added most of the details to the hull, built the turret, and added the spare track holders to both hull and turret. Here’s four views of the nearly complete model to start off with.

The ammo box on the back of the turret is a resin part of unknown origin, given to me by a fellow modeller when I purchased a second-hand Sherman V kit from him (thanks, Eelke!), and the overspray on the turret is because I painted the interior. The putty around the seam is to simulate the moulding marks on the real thing, and to disguise the kit parts’ join, which wasn’t as neat as it could be exactly because of my added interior — the plastic card turret wall I added pushed the upper part of the turret just a little to the left, but enough to be noticeable.

The exhaust and its cover are loose on the model, because I want to be able to paint the pipes separately, and that’s also the reason the spare track links aren’t fitted yet. The driver’s hatch is also missing because I forgot to add it before taking the photos

Here are some close-ups of the spare track holders on the hull and turret:

These turned out to be surprisingly quick to add, after the first couple anyway. They’re made from 0.4 mm spring steel wire, which I normally use for antennas because it’ll stand up to bumps without bending or breaking. I held track links up to the model, putting them in the same positions as in the photos of the real tank, then marking out where the holes were to go. Some drilling with an 0.5 mm bit in a pin vice later, I could insert the rods. I simply cut a short length off, dipped the end in superglue, and inserted it into one of the holes. Unfortunately, after taking the photos, I tried putting on the track links and found that I had misjudged the rear vertical pair of rods on the right side of the turret: they’re too close to the horizontal pair behind them, so I can’t put a link on both sets at once. Thus, I had to pull them out again and drill some new holes (which I couldn’t be bothered with just then, so it’s the first item on the agenda

).

Anyway, here’s a shot with links on:

As I mentioned, they’re not yet glued. I want to paint them separately, then attach them to the model and add the retaining bars over the links as well. Those will be simply plastic strip with two small holes drilled, so easy enough to make.

And a photo at more or less the same angle as the picture of the real tank I posted at the start of this thread:

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:10

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 27/03/2018 15:31:48)

At first I used a ruler to make sure the rods stuck out far enough (5 mm should be about right, I had determined from a track link) but that’s rather laborious, hard to hold to the model, and usually required me to measure and adjust several times before it was right. I therefore built a quick jig: a 5 mm length of plastic H-profile with a bit of plastic card glued to one end. Here’s all the tools needed:

Just insert the rod so that more than 5 mm sticks out, then use the jig to push it in. You can even use it to make sure the rod is mostly square to the rest of the model.

One lesson I learned, though, is that these Xuron cutters aren’t all the manufacturer’s web site makes them out to be:

That’s what a basically new pair of cutters looks like after making 37 cuts in 0.4 mm spring steel wire (36 wires for the model, plus one I cut too short). I’m glad I got them for free the other day, rather than having had to pay for them

They are good cutters, especially with the extra hinged bit you can see in the first photo, which seems to let them make much squarer cuts in wire than very similar cutters I have without that. Just don’t use them for very hard wire, I suppose.

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:11

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on 05/04/2018 18:59:07)

By now I’ve assembled the tracks:

This wasn’t as troublesome as I had expected from the few spare track links I put together earlier, and it’s surprisingly easy to keep them workable. All you need to do is not glue the middle of the link, but put liquid cement sparingly on the sides of the smaller, inside part.

I didn’t make two tracks the same length, because I don’t see the point of putting links together that will only be hidden entirely by the track covers. Instead, I intend to put sewing thread between the two ends of the track and pull it taut around the wheels with that, then turn the tracks to hide the thread under the track covers. (I’ve left the drive sprockets and idler wheels moveable to allow for that.)

Also, the model has been primed. I don’t normally do this, but there’s a fair amount of metal on this model so to prevent the paint flaking off that later on, I decided to give it a coat anyway:

**Guest** · 28 April 2018, 15:11

(Originally posted by me on the Military Modelling forums on >05/04/2018 19:19:55)

Next, preparation for some of the the markings on the real tank. It had the code A3 prominently on the ammo box fixed to the rear of the turret, so I’ll have to make that myself. Since the model is currently white and the A3 was too on the real tank, I decided to do it by masking.

I have a photo of the real tank that shows the marking quite well, but unfortunately it’s skewed — not unexpected in a photograph, of course. Luckily, Photoshop has a perspective crop tool that you can use to trim unwanted bits off an image and straighten it at the same time. You can get at it by holding the mouse button pressed on the crop tool, after which a menu pops out so that you can select the tool you want:

Then what you do, is click on the four corners of the part you want to cut out and straighten. Naturally, I chose the corners of the ammo box:

Pressing the Return key or clicking the check mark button in Photoshop’s toolbar crops the image to the bit you selected, and makes it rectangular:

It’s not the right size, though, so that needs to be tackled next. Since I cropped the image to the size of the ammo box, it was simply a matter of measuring up the ammo box on my model and using its height and width for the image (via the menu Image → Image Size):

I had to turn the “Constrain Proportions” checkbox off near the bottom of the window, else changing the image’s width also alters its height, and vice-versa, making it unlikely that the image can be gotten to the model box’s dimensions.

Unfortunately, the letters are white on a grey background, and that’s not all that clear. However, by making it negative (menu Image → Adjustments → Invert) and using the Levels tool (menu Image → Adjustments → Levels), I turned the A3 black and made the background much lighter, which improves legibility a lot:

To make the dark parts of an image darker, you move the little black triangle under the graph to the right; to make the light parts lighter, you move the light grey triangle to the left. (The middle grey triangle adjusts the balance between light and dark; I kept that in the middle because moving it didn’t really make much difference with the fairly extreme amount of lightening I applied.)

Then it’s just a matter of printing it out at 100% size:

Which results in:

Then it was off to my hobby room to cut out the A3 with a new, well-pointed knife:

This isn’t difficult, but a somewhat steady hand helps. If you mess up, just print out another copy and try again (and if you think it’s likely you’ll go wrong, you can print out a few copies of the image on the same piece of paper before you begin cutting at all — saves on paper, time, ink, etc.).

With the characters cut out, I applied a little bit of PVA glue to the backs of both with a cocktail stick and put them onto the model:

When I get round to spraying the model, they’ll (hopefully) nicely keep those parts of the turret white, and I can pry them off easily because PVA glue doesn’t stick that well to a plastic model. I suspect some touching up may be required, but that’s a lot easier than trying to paint codes like this freehand.

**Guest** · 04 July 2018, 09:03

Together with my Sherman V, I also painted the AVRE, since they needed the same colour anyway.

[ATTACH]307183[/ATTACH]

For completeness, here’s a shot of the oversprayed stencils on the back of the turret:

[ATTACH]307184[/ATTACH]

I’ll leave these on until I finish the main painting of the model, though.

**Steve Jones** · 06 July 2018, 20:43

Jakko

Great to see this at the painting stage. Its been great watching the build come together. Any cammo on it in the form of branches or a net??
I used to have a girlfriend called a net:smiling5:
Taxi for Jones!

**Guest** · 06 July 2018, 21:16

The model will look like the real tank in the photo at the start of this thread

It is, however, now brown, since earlier tonight. I was doing some more reading on tank colours for my Sherman, and noticed in Mike Starmer’s book on British AFV colours in North-West Europe that, according to the post-war final report about the 79th Armoured Division, all its original vehicles were still painted SCC 2 (brown) at that time too (except for Buffalos which were American OD). So I got to respray it with a new paint mix. Will post pictures tomorrow.

**Guest** · 07 July 2018, 09:07

As promised:

[ATTACH]307520[/ATTACH]

The model is much browner in real life than it appears on (my) screen, though. I had to look twice to be certain the model I saw on my iPad screen was the one that was actually in front of me — on that it looked like it was painted green, not brown, and when I got the photo to my computer I still had to adjust the colours a bit to make them browner. I still don’t think it looks like the brown on the model, but maybe it does on someone else’s :smiling3:

For comparison, the exhaust pipes are Tamiya XF-64 Red Brown with orange rust effect from Tamiya’s make-up compact weathering set, and the brackets on them are my SCC 15 mixture that the model was originally painted in for the photos above.

I’ve also sprayed the track links, also with XF-64 because looking at the photo at the start of this thread, I decided the (very likely rusted) tracks were not very much darker than the paintwork on the tank, so I picked a paint bottle with a rust colour not too much darker than the model.

**Guest** · 24 July 2018, 17:29

I made some more progress, after being forced to take a step back first in order to do so … As I mentioned earlier, I had added lengths of steel rod to the sides of hull and turret to hang the spare track links onto. The plan was to glue the links to the model and then add a piece of plastic strip with holes drilled for the pins to pass through, retaining them much like on the real tank (just without the nuts or whatever go on the ends).

This turned out to be rather more difficult than planned. It needed twelve lengths of strip, and getting the holes right in all of them was turning into such a major job that I gave up on that after about five or six. Since the rods extended past the track links, I also couldn’t just glue the strips to the ends and then add a plastic card disc to the end to represent the nut. After a lot of deliberation, I decided to take the rigorous route:

[ATTACH]309542[/ATTACH]

I first pulled the links off the model, which was easy enough because I’d superglued them to it, so putting a knife blade between link and turret, then twisting just popped the paint off the link or the turret and got the link free.

I then put yet more notches into the blades of the damaged cutters I also showed above, by snipping about a millimetre off each of the rods that was to hold links (I left the others alone). To do this right, I needed to hold the model on its side, at eye level, and the cutters horizontal — due to the extra swivelling bit, they only just square in that orientation, it seems. This was a bit fiddly, but not that difficult.

After that I put the links back onto the turret, painted the insides of the plastic strip I’d cut, and once that was dry, glued them to the links with superglue:

[ATTACH]309543[/ATTACH]

That just left the nuts to add, which I made by punching 0.65 mm discs from 0.25 mm plastic card:

[ATTACH]309544[/ATTACH]

Finally, when the glue had dried, I painted the outsides of the strips as well. Now I need to start weathering this model, but I’m still undecided how to do that best so that it replicates the photo at the very top of this thread. For one thing, I’m very puzzled about the dark line running along the side of the turret. For another, I’m wondering if the stowage bin on the back of the turret might be SSC 15 olive drab, if the rest of the tank is SCC 2 brown — it certainly looks darker than the rest of the tank, but not than the ammo box fixed to it.

**Peter Gillson** · 24 July 2018, 20:36

Great to catch up with this build. It is going to be a cracker when finished

Peter

Scale Model Shop

Churchill Mk. IV AVRE at Westkapelle, ca. 1946

Churchill Mk. IV AVRE at Westkapelle, ca. 1946

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