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Post by Robbo on May 15, 2020 10:14:46 GMT -6
This makes me want to start scratching a few bits, awesome building.
Where is your home town Mr Beekster
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Post by Beekster on May 15, 2020 12:21:39 GMT -6
This makes me want to start scratching a few bits, awesome building. Where is your home town Mr Beekster Hillsboro, Oregon. What I'm doing here isn't uncommon for me. I'll buy a resin conversion, and if there are issues I will use the pieces as patterns for my own. I save myself the time and effort of doing the original engineering, and my time is worth more than the $40 I spent on this particular conversion. Measuring and duplicating in this fashion takes less time by far than working everything out on your own. |
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Post by JED on May 16, 2020 14:32:07 GMT -6
A shame about the mishap but yet more great work in overcoming it,looking great
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Post by Beekster on Jun 2, 2020 16:40:48 GMT -6
So, what have we here?  A rough guesstimate based on the graduations marked on the cup would be about seven milliliters worth of VVSS end connectors. What's that you say? Not a terribly helpful metric? Well, it's also about four hours of boredom and a couple of scalpel blades dulled. Still not very useful? Then how about this: This represents every end connector in a bag of Panda Plastics T51 rubber block tracks for Sherman-family vehicles. To be more precise, that's 33 sprues worth at 12 end connectors per sprue, or 396 of them. A Sherman or Lee short-hull variant requires 79 links per side, or 316 end connectors for a whole tank. Yes, I've got more than I need for this model...but the extras are a down payment on the tracks for the M10C Desert Rat Achilles. I've had enough boredom for one day, so I won't start cleaning up track blocks until tomorrow. Amongst the reasons this project has slowed down a great deal is the fact that it takes a great deal of time to build tracks for a Sherman or one of it's cousins. Another one is that I've got a few detail questions that need answers, and I suspect those will be found in David Doyle's forthcoming huge book on the Lee/Grant series. That's due sometime this summer. |
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Post by dogfish7 (R.I.P.) on Jun 2, 2020 17:47:15 GMT -6
Yikes!  |
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Post by Beekster on Jun 2, 2020 18:00:02 GMT -6
Yikes! Just par for the course when building Shermans using link tracks, which I prefer over band tracks for their more realistic appearance. The long-hull M4A4 uses four more links per side, but the difference in effort is trivial. No matter what, it's a job of work to build a set of tracks. And these are the easy ones! Bronco's tracks are more difficult to build; ModelKasten's are the absolute best for detail but have NINE parts per link, to include the little clamp nuts on the end connectors which Panda molds on. I have one set of Modelkasten in the stash, and they are more an object of reverence than something I'll ever use on a build. |
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