US Army M32B1 Tank Recovery Vehicle

[Guest]

Well, this is fun … Now the heat is over, I thought I’d continue building the mine roller. I had already discovered that the Bold Division instructions don’t really tell you at which height to fit the beam at the front of the tank to which the rollers attach, but I found a photo that shows it really well in an article by Steve Zaloga in Military Modelling. With that in hand, I found the kit parts simply can’t fit the way the real thing did Either it sits at the right height but with an edge at the top instead of a flat, or it sits far too low with a flat side at the top.

It turns out the support is entirely wrong, as you can see here (the support is on the drive sprocket, not that obvious):

[ATTACH]459029[/ATTACH]

And that’s not all, which is why the other parts are on there too. The brackets into which the roller parts hinge, are wrong too: the one at the top should sit on a flat, but Bold Division gives you one that sits on both sides of the edge, while at the bottom, it’s the other way around (I didn’t mix them up: you get two for the top and four for the bottom). And then there’s the large side plate for the rollers: the lid on that has clearly the wrong shape and the wrong pattern of bolts on it … less obviously, it’s also missing the bevel along its outer edge.

This will give me a good deal of extra work to make new brackets after figuring out their shapes, and to correct those bolted lids and bevelled edges

[Jim R]

It's one thing after another with this build. I have no doubt you'll sort it and it does make for an interesting blog.

[Guest]

It’s par for the course for these kinds of models I build, it seems. I think I said before I would really like to build something straight from the box one of these days, though

[scottie3158]

Jakko,
You should stop noticing these things mate and make your life easier I'm sure you will scratch a suitable replacement.

[Guest]

That thought had occurred to me too: a lot of people would probably just build the thing per the instructions and be quite happy with the result

[Scratchbuilder]

Jakko,
Just caught up with your build, and a lot of building is going on. I agree with you on the problems with resin kits, and the fit and warping. But you will overcome as usual. Great work.
Mike.

[Guest]

Thanks This is all correctible, definitely, just a lot more work than I expected so it’s a bit of a setback when I kind of want to get this model finished sooner rather than later. The main problem I now see is figuring out the shape of the supports between the tank and the hexagonal beam, everything else is easy enough to measure and estimate from the picture above but the actual shape of the supports is very hard to make out.