That's would make sense, to avoid glare off the glass.

Too bad the straw didn't work out but the mantlet and searchlight cover look pretty darn good.

Thanks Gamera.  :D

Matching these things up to all of the pictures isn't easy. I'd like to think I'm pretty close lol.

That is one awesome beast,loving that detail on the spot light.I can't believe that massive turret.

Mike that is looking impressive in the detailing! I'm kinda bummed now that I didn't get the A2 version with the spotlight. It adds some cool interest to it, and your cover is killer. Loving the mantlet cover too.

Is this a commission build? I don't know how you could give something like this up after putting so much hear and work into it!

Looking forward to seeing this one finished Mike. Excellent work on the Spotlight.

Thank you all.  :D

Yes this is a commissioned build. I found out last week that the guy I'm building this for knows the guy who used to command this exact tank.

I won't have too much of a problem giving it up after knowing who will be displaying it.  :)

I had to double check with my Dad about that searchlight cover. He's always modeled them that way and I asked him if they were really like that. Indeed, there was a piece of plywood in there to keep it flat so the material wouldn't rub against the glass.

And that IS the biggest turret I've ever seen as well. lol

Thanks for the comments guys. :)

Looking good, Mike.

I've thought about using an accordion straw myself, sorry to hear it 's a dead end.

Yeah, that is too bad. If I could find a glue that would stick to it I could have dealt with the paint chipping off because it wouldn't be touched. But I couldn't even get that much to cooperate with me.

Fortunately I have references that show the type I made was used on some of the A2's.

Now that I've got the 109 in primer and sitting on the sidelines I've taken some pictures of the M-103 all together with my German crew for scale. This is a really huge tank my friends. Enormous! Just scroll and see for yourself. This photo shoot was also really good for bringing back my mo jo for this project... and the figures. They look like mannequins lol.

She's a big'un! Now, to get this project restarted.  :)

Looking impressive, Mike. I was honestly confused about the figures until I read the post, lol. They look nice though!

I am surprised you can't find a paper straw with that accordion style thing happening? I'm sure they're out there, but finding them might be another issue..

Cool Mike, gives a good impression of what a brute the M-103 was.

Nice work on the figures too. Though it does make me think about how many big fat holes the M-103's 120mm would punch in a Royal Tiger if it had been around a decade earlier.

Paper straws?? I'm going to look for those.

Funny thing about us before WWII. We developed the Sherman to compete with the Panzer IV's. Why in the world we didn't contemplate building a complete battlefield dominator is beyond me. We should have been thinking of tanks that would have beat the crap out of the Panzer IV's and thinking further ahead than we were.

If we had M-26's even a few years earlier we would've run over the Germans in a matter of months perhaps. With the Air power available to us at the time of Normandy we would have had the same logistics problems as Romel did in the desert lol. We would have simply run too far, too fast. The war would've been vastly different.

Jump forward to the M-48 and M-60 programs and think of how different it would've been had we been more inclined to get more of that type of thinking sooner than we did.

But that didn't happen.

Just one M-103 would've made an enormous difference in France back then. While we're thinking of it, let''s just imagine one Abrams transported back in time lol. What a heck of a thing that would've been lol!!

Well we did have a heavy tank in the M6 but it wasn't very good so it never entered combat. 

Then the US Army hit a crash program with the T29, T30, and T34 heavy tanks that missed the war but were updated to the M103 to deal with Soviet Cold War heavy hardware. 

Then you had just weird stuff like the M7 and T20...

Strange stuff you pick up from World of Tanks, stopped playing over a year ago but I'm glad I did just due to the introduction to stuff like this. 

The M6, yes that was a dead end because it was already outdated before the war started for us. The Pershing was only in the last couple of weeks of the closing of the war. If it had come sooner however, things would've been different. None of this speculation matters in the end though. Its already history and can't be rewritten lol.

I finally decided on which driver's vision blocks to use. The kit came with solid or clear parts for this area, but not for any of the other vision blocks on the model. Since all of the others are solid and need to be painted I chose to keep with the solid block theme here. The clear ones would look great, no doubt, but they would be the only clear ones on the entire tank.

I finished the green dot filtering on the hull.

And I even found the headlight lenses that were temporarily missing due to being a cat owner lol.

Not much in the way of exciting, but a little progress is better than none I suppose.

Dang Mike I step away for a couple days and you have turned this into a winner!!. Fantastic looking build  Mike!!

Thanks Feldgrau! She's getting there. I just need to finish what I started lol. I'm not really happy with the way the dot filtering has turned out so far, but that only because I didn't clear it with a gloss before adding the filter. It doesn't blend as well over the dull surface. But once I get a gloss on her I'll be going over the filters again and blending hem in even further. This tank is going to get a bit green-er lol.

M. Brindos

And I even found the headlight lenses that were temporarily missing due to being a cat owner lol.

Probably a tasteless joke.

This is excellent finish work IMO. I like it so much that after my Tiran is finished, I'm going green.

Speaking of which Tiran, I will do a gloss coat and try filters on it. I've tried filters a couple of times, but cheated on the gloss coat.

They blend  far better with a gloss. I thought I'd cheat the process and I'm not liking the effect as much. The little M-48 I build looks a whole lot smoother in contrast to this paint job thus far. But after I finish the filtering of the turret I'll gloss it and get better blending over the current finish.

I'm thinking of doing a light dirt wash over all of this after I dull it back down, just to bring some more brown tones into the overall color after I, probably go too far with the green. I need to do some respraying of the shadow colors on the underside as some of that was worn off after it was roughly hand tossed by accident and I broke off those 5 road wheels lol. Plus the paint is getting worn away from handling on all the corners. I should have glossed it much sooner and now I'm paying for it. However this may actually lend the paining more realism as they were always spot painting these things and never left any chipping to rust or weather for very long.

They kept up on regular maintenance and so these beasts never looked very worn at all.

Edit: The cat lives. He's far too cute to gut, even if he's been eating paint chips lol.

Wow, what a model!, with the figures you can see the size as you mentioned.

Looks cool to me, from the photos the dot filtering looks really nice.

Mike, I think it looks fine, and I'm a but dubious about filtering over gloss. I filter over a light "satin" which is just shy of flat. Even filtering over flat is going to get you a better impression of what the outcome is going to be than gloss. You know how gloss tends to darken and alter the actual color of the paint? I tried it once, and while the dispersion is easier to control, it's also a lot harder to accurately judge where you are with the depth. I would suggest trying a acrylic wash with the base coat color if you think it's too "green". The more layers you put on it, the more varied the finish will be too, which doesn't hurt. :)

Karl - I've been using a Krylon "Matte" clear and it comes out as a semi gloss. I suppose I should be more clear about that. I do have a can of gloss which is excellent for the coverage and was thinking of using it for the next round of filters, but you've just convinced me otherwise.

I'll stick with the Matte.

Garzonh and Gam, thank you guys! Thank you for the support  :D

Update time again.  :)






I've been getting the dot filtering done on the turret. You can see what progress I've made on that part. I've also got the faded gray rubber painted onto the road wheels and return rollers. They're needing a bit of touch up to the green as there is some worn paint on some of the edges due to me not clear coating the finish before all of this handling going on right now. I keep having to spot repair the fender edges too. Which is okay because they actually did that a lot in the real world.

I've got a bit too carried away on the one side with the Verridian Green oil I'm using for the filter. No worries though because it'll all work out in the end I'm sure.

The model is looking good, Mike.

Do you decant your clear coats and airbrush them? I hope so, because I've found that spraying them out of the can nozzle itself lays it on waaaay thicker than you would want it.

No Karl I don't decant them. :/

But now I'm thinking about it.

I do like my clear cotes to be a good thickness to protect the paint underneath, but I see what you're saying. I'll let you know if I do finally decant the canned clear. I'm curious about how well that works now.

Thanks for that info. I'll get back to you on that.  :)

Here's an update. I've just finished the dot filtering and I'm going to give that a day to dry a bit before laying down a satin finish.




I'd say that "greened" it up pretty good. This is how the tank should look after a "gasoline" wash that both the regular Army and the Marines would do the "Liven" up the paint after they washed them (I forget which one of you guys had mentioned that and I had to ask My Dad if they really did that. Confirmation from an ex tanker of that era says yes.). It worked well but faded the paint even faster.

My Dad has lots of pictures of M-60's in his private stash that show how the MERDC camo scheme faded shortly after being applied. The tan would last the longest, but the other three colors almost faded into one shade. I want to try replicating that effect later, and hopefully on something in a smaller scale lol.

Edit: I really like this effect now that its done. The color changes depending on the lighting and source. It goes from a bright green to faded pale green even in the pictures. Pretty neat!  lol

M. Brindos

No Karl I don't decant them. :/

But now I'm thinking about it.

I do like my clear cotes to be a good thickness to protect the paint underneath, but I see what you're saying. I'll let you know if I do finally decant the canned clear. I'm curious about how well that works now.

Thanks for that info. I'll get back to you on that.  :)

That coat is looking pretty "green" in the first two pics; the bottom one looks more in-the-ballpark, Don't forget to monkey around with your White Balance too on your camera, if you have one. You can really alter the tone of a photo with that sometimes.