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Hi everyone,

here's my entry - the French Sherman upgrade with the AMX 13 turret:


Picture by Chars Francais - see this and many more here.

After WW2 France developed a series of upgrade packages to increase the veteran's firepower. These are commonly known as Sherman Revalorisé. Israel bought two of them, which found fame as the M50 and M51. A third option was mounting the complete turret of the AMX 13 light tank onto the Sherman chassis. This version saw some use by Egypt, but with nowhere near the success of its Israeli opponents.


Source: User Bukvoed via Wikimedia Commons, licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0

And here's what I'm going to use - the leftovers from my comatose M32 project and the turret from a Tamiya AMX 13 which I managed to get very cheaply a while ago. I'll add some Eduard etch and whatever else I'll find useful along the way



As I literally have no space left on my workbench at the moment this won't be started immediately, but I hope to get something else finished in the next few days. Famous last words...

Philipp

Nice choice. Be aware that the Tamiya turret is a late model so you'll have to modify it quite a bit.

Thanks for the warning! What do I need to fix? I'm not exactly an expert on the AMX-13

Philipp

Okay, it's the rubber lip around the turret cradle instead of the bellows - thankfully a separate part on the Tamiya kit, should be easy to fix. The prototype turret also has no lifting rings. Anything else I missed?

Philipp

Another interesting project Philipp. Have fun with it.

Vincent

Philipp Gross wrote: ↑22 Jan 2021, 23:39 Okay, it's the rubber lip around the turret cradle instead of the bellows - thankfully a separate part on the Tamiya kit, should be easy to fix. The prototype turret also has no lifting rings. Anything else I missed?

Philipp

The auxiliary sights are different. They were a simple spring with a thin rod and a "ball" at the top. The antennas and their bases were different too.
When removing the dust cover be sure the rails above and below are absent too. I don't remember if Tamiya molded them all in a single piece.
Do not use the NBC decontamination bottle at the back of the turret.

Thank you Olivier! The frames are separate too, I only need to fill in some trenches where the parts would go. The rest seems to be easy enough, the early antenna bases seem to be the American WW2 type.

Philipp

So, I put together a few turret parts out of curiosity...and ended up with this two days later




As you can see the modifications from a late to an early turret required some extra effort I hadn't exactly planned for. But I hope I got everything. Still missing are the tool brackets on the left side, the real tank, as a prototype/test bed, didn't carry any, so I'll have to scratchbuild a little more.

The rubber seal is made from lead foil, the US type antennas are by Panzer Art. And thanks to my excessive sanding I had to remake the weld seams with Vallejo putty.

And just for the fun of it:


Sadly the wrong type of hull

Philipp

Looks good Phil, amazing how a “couple of minutes” at the workbench suddenly turns into a near finished project!

Nice work Philipp

Vincent