Grant CDL in 1:35

[adt70hk]

Joining the rabble on this one Jakko!

[Jim R]

Good progress Jakko. One or two little things to figure out but nothing to worry about.

[Mickc1440]

A really unusual subject and great intro. I'll join the growing group

[Guest]

Like many recent Sherman and Lee/Grant kits (and the aforementioned Bronco Ram), Takom supplies separate edges to the rims of the idler wheels, because these were undercut on the real tank:

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Unlike most of those kits, they’re in plastic here rather than etched brass. I think I prefer this, because if you managed to bend it, a plastic ring is easier to straighten out than an etched one. On the other hand, the rings leave a definite gap on this kit, which I didn’t see on the MiniArt M3 or RFM Sherman kits with their etched rings. Of course, it still needs to be filled.

I also put together the main parts of the upper hull:

[ATTACH]472017[/ATTACH]

Takom would have you fit the two large side plates, next attach stuff to the roof, and only then return to the hull to attach the other pieces. I think this is a recipe for not getting things straight, so I started at the left rear corner of the hull and worked clockwise around it to the right rear, skipping only the curved bit at the right front that the 75 mm gun will go through — that, I added once the right hull side was in place. This piece doesn’t really fit that well: you can get either the right or left side to fit nicely, but not both, without glue. In the end, the solution was to just glue all three sides (left, right and under) and manipulate it into place before it sets too hard.

Then, before the glue on all these bits sets, I put on the roof, without glue, and pushed and pulled everything so it all meets up correctly.

[Mini Me]

Just caught up to this Jakko.......I'll take a back seat and watch for Matron. Looking good so far.

[Guest]

I had started building the 75 mm M2 gun when I realised Takom wants you to put an external shield on that was fairly common on American tanks but that I don’t think I’ve ever seen on British ones. Similarly, they tell you to add the counterweights at the muzzle, and though those do appear on Grants, they are much rarer than plain barrels (the counterweights were for when the stabiliser was installed: without them, it would raise the barrel to maximum because the stabiliser was designed for the longer M3 gun). I had caught on to the fact that I probably shouldn’t fit the counterweights, so used muzzle E5 rather than E6 (which has notches for the counterweights) but only later noticed the shield part.

Luckily, part D4 is a rotor for use with a plain barrel without the external shield, so I dove into my spares box for a MiniArt barrel (left over from my previous M3 builds), which I had to lengthen by 3 mm using 4.8 mm tube to get it to fit correctly:

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… and then I discovered the E sprue also has the correct barrel I’ll keep this one, though, as it has the rifling that Takom’s doesn’t.

The air intake on the engine deck is an open hole:

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You could paint it black underneath, but I had another MiniArt part intended to solve just this problem, so all I did was box it in with some plastic card:

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In place below the air intake:

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It’s still loose here, as I want to paint it first.

[Guest]

After adding the hull roof and various of the not-that-small details, I also built the turret:

[ATTACH]472287[/ATTACH]

I should really have glued the roof to the side plates when I put those on — there is nothing that needs to go inside for which you are best off keeping the roof separate (just don’t forget to drill the holes Takom tells you to first ) and adding the roof together with the sides helps everything to fit properly. I have a couple of small gaps that don’t worry me, but fit would have been better if I had put the roof on right away.

The gun mount is glued in place, the one that goes side-to-side, anyway. I skipped adding the levers that would move the sight (on the roof above it) along with the gun, and just glued the sight down too.

The turret fits well and looks good, though I lost one of the clamps that go on the front and rear roof edges when it pinged out of my tweezers There should be three on each side, but right now I have only two on the front.

[Neil Merryweather]

that is one FUGLY beast!

[scottie3158]

It certainly doesn't have a low profile it must have stuck out like a sore thumb on the horizon. But nice work.

[Tim Marlow]

Excellent research and building, but I do agree with Neil, she’s an ugly mother! Something of the Dalek about her as well……

[Guest]

that is one FUGLY beast!

Yeah, it’s not exactly the prettiest tank you’ve ever seen … The sloping turret roof actually makes it look worse, IMHO, than it would had it had a flat roof. But that’s not very visible in the photo above, so maybe count our blessings?

It certainly doesn't have a low profile it must have stuck out like a sore thumb on the horizon. But nice work.

The normal Grant was already 3.12 metres tall, and this one’s turret is about twice the height of the regular one …

Something of the Dalek about her as well……

Especially with that dummy gun barrel. The early Grant CDLs and the American T10 variant didn’t have that, which TBH makes them look slightly less bad, if you ask me.

[Guest]

At the rear, the engine deck wouldn’t fit:

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I solved this by filing its rear edge until it did:

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However, after this I built the two stowage bins that sit on the rear corners, and they indicate that the actual problem is the rear plate being too far forward. The bins have brackets moulded on to them, some of which are supposed to touch the rear plate, but don’t — by about the same distance as the engine deck was too long. You can also tell by the bevelled edge to the deck’s side, which is nicely above the corresponding bevel on the vertical pieces.

So, the better solution would have been to glue some strip between the side and rear plates, thick enough that the engine deck can just drop in place without filing. Next time (though I kind of doubt it, because I think I prefer MiniArt’s more complex M3 kits over Takom’s simpler ones ).

[Jim R]

Sounds as if it has thrown up a few issues. All sorted though. The engine deck air intake is very poor. Your fix is a great improvement over an empty hole.

[Guest]

The empty hole isn’t quite as bad as it looks here, because a fairly fine bit of etching will go over it. This is MiniArt’s engine deck to illustrate the mesh grating:



And this thread shows it in place on the model, giving a reasonable idea of how much you can actually see through it. If I hadn’t had the MiniArt engine part, I would just have painted the hull interior black as far as can be seen through the grating, or maybe built a little plastic box and painted that black. It would still look good that way, I think — but if you have the engine part spare, why not use it?

[Guest]

It’s always fun to get new information that shows you’ve been building things for nothing It turns out that most, if not all, Grant CDLs were fitted with an armoured cover over the air intake on the engine deck, which is a fitting developed in the UK and apparently intended for fitting on Grants and Lees in general, but not fitted to (m)any in the end. I had spotted it in some CDL photographs and the Grant Mk. I stowage diagram, but wasn’t sure I wanted to build it, as I lacked information. However, I had asked a question about the Grant CDL stowage bins (half of which are also missing in the Takom kit) over on Missing-Lynx, and this resulted in me being sent a series of new (as in: taken within the last few weeks) photos of the one in India, showing the armoured cover from various angles:

[ATTACH]472791[/ATTACH]
(Photo by Jim Goetz, via Leife Hulbert)

Of course, that means the MiniArt engine I had by now painted, is no longer necessary. It wasn’t a wasted effort, though, as I still have the M31 tank recovery vehicle to build at some point, and it has the same engine deck, so I just put the engine into its box.

Armed with the photos, I sat down at my computer with my model’s hull and a ruler, measuring up both the model with said ruler and the photos of the real tank in Adobe Photoshop, so I could work out dimensions and create drawings of the armoured cover in Adobe Illustrator:

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Only then could I start building the cover in earnest …

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I decided to laminate it from plastic card, as the openings are on the underside and hardly visible, and IMHO, building it from plates like the real thing is fiddly and liable to go askew. So I cut the plates you can see in the photo above — the numbers are their thicknesses in millimetres, with two 1.5 mm ones for the top because, as you can see in the drawing, that should be 3 mm thick but I have no 3 mm card. They’re all slightly oversize, because after assembling them into the right shape:

[ATTACH]472786[/ATTACH]

and waiting for the glue to dry, I could file the whole thing to its proper shape and dimensions:

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After the cover was the right size, I filled its sides with putty and sanded that flat, to try and ensure none of the laminations would be visible.

Note that the side towards the tank superstructure is not square, because the engine deck slopes down a little while the superstructure rear plate is vertical.

I then put a plate into the grill opening in the engine deck:

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The two plates along the rear edge are also moulded there by Takom, but I had to cut them away to make room for this plate, as they overhang into the grill opening. I also cut away the rivets on the superstructure that would be covered by the intake, because of course, it being solid they would be in the way. On the real tank, this side of the intake cover seems to have been open: there are no welds along the front edges, and by having it open, the rivets wouldn’t be in the way. Plus, of course, there is no need for a plate there in the first place.

Then just glue the cover in place:

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And add the remaining details:

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