Dutch Army M4A1 (76 mm) VVSS, 1950s

[Jakko]

With Churchill almost finished, I find myself in need of a model that’s quick and easy to build, if only to prove to myself that I can complete a model in under a year About three months ago, I purchased this kit at a model show:

Takom’s brand-new M4A1 (76 mm) VVSS. Considering the general quality of Takom kits, I think it’s a suitable one to build without a lot of hassle. First, though, a look at and in the box. Starting with at, because the first thing you’ll notice is:

That box is more than twice the depth of an Asuka one, while all of them contain one Sherman … When you open the box, it gives the impression that this is mainly because Takom doesn’t appear to be very good at designing sprues so they fit neatly in a certain size of box, and so just opted for a bigger box. But for that price, you can’t complain: €34.95 is ten to twenty euros less than you pay for an Asuka Sherman around here (depending on the exact version). And as we will see, you’re getting your money’s worth. Largely because of this:

The first photo shows a set of VVSS suspension with two types of wheel (both late types, with larger hubs for stronger ball bearings), the second photo shows a set of HVSS suspension and some extra details (you get two copies of each of these sprues). So, you buy a VVSS Sherman and actually get all the parts you need to make an HVSS Sherman instead — except that the only tracks included are these:

(Times four.) VVSS only, then, not HVSS. But the latter can be bought separately from several different manufacturers, so you can easily use the HVSS bogies for a different model. Now, Takom also has an M4A1 (76 mm) HVSS, which presumably lacks the VVSS sprues. But with a bit better planning, they could have saved this trouble, because it leaves me with the impression that the only reason for those HVSS sprues is because they also include the drive sprockets, periscope flaps, etc.

Also noteworthy is that the upper hull is packaged separately with a piece of bubble wrap on it. Here without its plastic bag:

It turns out that the bubble wrap is because of this:

Very good to see that they’re doing their best to prevent those two pins from breaking off. After taking these photos, I put the hull back into its bag with the bubble wrap back on it.

There are also some notable accessories in the kit:

Two diferent extra armour plates and a set of sandbags for the hull front. Of course, you can only use one of these, but I find the sandbags especially noteworthy because you don’t often see this in plastic. I haven’t been able to find the upper of the two armour plates in photos of real Shermans yet, but the bottom one is from a well-known picture of an American tank. Unfortunately, that tank was a slightly different variant than what’s in this kit … The photo of it clearly shows it to have the round, two-piece loader’s hatch while the kit has the later, oval, single-piece hatch (aside from which, on the real tank, the crew had swapped the commander’s and loader’s hatches).

But that’s only relevant if you want it to be for your model, of course In any case, in addition to all of this you also get an aluminium gun barrel (as well as a plastic one), a copper-wire tow cable and etched parts for things like the headlight guards. What’s more, the kit also has two gun shields: with and without the canvas cover, though the instructions only mention the latter.

A very complete kit, really, and as I mentioned earlier, it also looks like very good value for money.

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I intend to use this kit to build an M4A1 (76 mm) of the Royal Netherlands Army (Koninklijke Landmacht, lit. “Royal Ground Force”, or KL). This appears to have mainly had HVSS tanks, but also at least some with VVSS, as these photos show:

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Here’s that same tank a bit closer, cropped from the photo above:

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And again, the relevant tank cropped from the photo:

Except for the suspension, they seem to differ little from the more numerous HVSS tanks.

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There are some minor differences between many of these tanks, especially in number and placement of fire extinguishers, by the looks of it. They all have an extra piece of curved steel over the horn, apparently simply welded to the legs of its brush guard. The photo of the tank on the Bailey bridge also shows it had an infantry telephone on the right rear, and of course all the VVSS tanks have the spare track holders on the turret sides and a gun travel lock with a hinged piece part that goes over the barrel. These details show they were supplied as part of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), and didn’t come from a post-war vehicle dump somewhere. I do wonder if the VVSS tanks had the armoured first-aid kit container on the left side of the hull, like the HVSS tank that’s pictured from the left, but I haven’t found a photo of a Dutch M4A1 (76 mm) VVSS tank that shows this side.

Markings are the original American registration number towards the front of the hull sides, with in front of it on the left the Dutch national emblem (a black disc with an orange lion rampant) and on the right, a triangular emblem with a number in it. I’m not sure what colours this had, though — if I had to guess I would go for yellow over red, as the light colour is darker than the registration number. On the turret is a geometric shape with a number inside. The squadron and platoon, perhaps? It doesn’t look like the individual tank’s number because the first photo has two tanks that are both number ③. The registration number also appears to be painted on the underside of the turret bustle.

[Armorsmith]

Interesting to see that your copy of the kit has the sandbags for the front plate as well two pieces. My kit had it as one. I actually split it as shown on your copy to get a better fit. However, in the end I just left them off. Good luck with yours.

[Jakko]

I don’t think the sandbags on my kit are two pieces. Unless I’m mistaken (I don’t have the kit at hand right now), it’s just a single part with all of the bags.

[Armorsmith]

My mistake. Upon closer inspection it is indeed one piece. If you’re going to use it best to fit it before adding the headlamps, etc. as it is a tight fit with them mounted. Although trying to fit the headlamps etc. after the sandbags might be challenging as well. In the end I left them off.

[JayJHCruz]

I’ll be following this with great interest, good sir!

[Jakko]

@Armorsmith

best to fit it before adding the headlamps, etc. as it is a tight fit with them mounted.

Looking at the part in the photo, I can see how it would be, yes. I won’t be using any of these parts on this model, of course, but it’s useful information to store away for the future.

[Jakko]

this model has ground to a standstill the moment I wanted to actually start building it. I began with step 1:

Find the nose bits. OK, they’re easy to spot. Except I couldn’t locate them on the sprues. They’re on sprue P. WTF is sprue P? Checking the sprue diagram, it looks like this:

Yep, that’s indeed not in the box … Check around my hobby room, to make sure I hadn’t misplaced it when taking those photos the other day, but no, it’s simply not there

[SSGToms]

Bummer! I hate when that happens!

[Jakko]

I’ve sent an email to the seller to see what they can do. I suspect they’ll refer me to Takom, but we’ll see.

[Jakko]

At last I’ll be continuing with this one! Last June, at the TWENOT’s 50th anniversary show, the vendor I had bought the kit from handed me the missing sprue. But then it still took until today before I started:

And the wheels:

The kit has two kinds, these concave ones and the late spoked type with the big hub and plates between the spokes. The only photo I found of a Dutch M4A1 (76 mm) VVSS that also shows the wheels, has the concave ones but also — I think — a stamped-spoke one. So I took one of those from Asuka out of my spares box, but I had to put in a brass bushing to let it fit the Takom axles. This is not hard to do: find some tube that fits the axle nicely, then drill out the holes in the wheel so the tube fits in that, saw off the right length of tube and glue it into the wheel.

And then I noticed something when I took a closer look at the photos earlier in this thread:

This tank doesn’t have T54E1 tracks (the kind you get in this kit) but T74s. And those are not easy to find in 1:35 … Bronco has/had a set, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to try and build Bronco Sherman tracks. The only other realistic options are Master Club and Chino Model, so I ended up ordering a set of the latter from Japan.

[Jakko]

I noticed this in the instruction:

The same step twice, but as a mirror image. The parts are exactly the same, so what’s going on? Only when you look closely at the parts themselves, does it become clear what they’re trying to tell you here: Make sure that the side of U2 that has the four holes in it, faces in one direction for three of the bogies but the other way on the remaining three. They could have made that a lot more obvious.

Unlike, for example, RFM’s bogies, these ones at least are not copies of Asuka’s. I built them a little differently from how the instructions would have it, though.

I did start as per the drawings above, but then added the outside plates. Except I had glued T2 to U2 and waited for the glue between to dry before adding the other bits, which meant the outer plates didn’t always want to fit quite flush. Something to keep in mind for the next one, should I buy another The wheel arms can be snapped into the bogies (hopefully …) but I’ll need to clean up the seams on the wheels first.

The upper hull is now on the lower, though still loose:

Another example of Takom’s instructions, this: they would have you glue the sponson floors to the lower hull, add all the details to the upper hull and only then glue the two hull halves together. That will have you knocking details off, but just as importantly, there is no reasonable way to set the sponson floors at right angles to the lower hull sides. Asuka, for example, gives a hull bulkhead that extends into the sponsons, and that will let you get the floors square. Nothing of the sort here, though. It’s perfectly doable on a computer screen, of course, which once again makes me think that nobody at Takom is a (real) modeller.

Instead, I glued the floors into the upper hull (after fitting the hinges for the drivers’ hatches) and then put the upper and lower together without glue so the floors will line out properly. Now I just need to wait for the glue to dry before going on.

[Jakko]

This is how far you “need” to build the upper hull before you can glue it onto the lower:

The sponson floors, the fixed periscopes for the drivers, the ring to mount the bow machine gun, the hinges for the driver’s hatches and the plates with the air filters. For all of these goes that you can’t reach them anymore (or only with difficulty, anyway) once the hull parts are joined.

The air filters, with the plates they sit on, are another case of Takomitis: according to the instructions, you need to build them and glue them to the lower hull, to the overhanging rear ends of the sponson floors. That means they will be glued along one edge, and good luck getting them properly square. But if you glue the sponson floors into the upper hull, you can glue the plates with the filters into that as well, and they will be stuck down along three edges that are at almost right angles to each other.

Both those plates also had a triangular piece projecting inward, but I cut that off because those were only introduced in late 1944. Though they might well have been on any given MDAP tank, the chances are probably just as great that they weren’t

Here’s another example of Takom order of assembly:

The red arrow points to a set of louvres that go under the rear overhang of the upper hull, attaching to the top of the lower hull rear wall and inside the overhang. According to Takom, you glue this part to the top of the rear wall only, projecting out into nothing, because the upper hull will only be installed over it several pages later in the instructions. Of course that will all line up perfectly …! Personally, I think it will be a lot easier to only install the louvres once the hull parts are glued together.

The white arrows point to the exhausts, which are glued into the cutouts in the louvre part. But AFAIK, all M4A1s (and M4s) had curved exhausts that more or less follow the shape of the hull. Not that you’ll be able to see them on the finished model unless you hold it upside down, so it doesn’t matter much, but still. On mine, the louvres and exhausts will be left off entirely for exactly that reason: once the second set of louvres below them is on, you can’t see anything at all of them anymore. (That’s also why I only glued two hooks to each air filter, at the back and inboard. The other two are almost impossible to see anyway.)

[Jakko]

The wheels have a seam that needs to be removed, because they were moulded in two halves:

Into the swivelling vice so I could scrape down the seams with a blunt knife blade, because that way, you get damage to the “rubber” for free I had to stop halfway through, though, because my thumb ached too much, but I finished the job later on.

On Missing-Lynx, the hull was identified as one from the General Steel foundry, which had little indentations at the corners of the engine deck:

Left (in the photo) unmodified, right (so left on the tank) I cut these out with a sharp knife. I put too much pressure on the one at the rear and went all the way through the thickness of the engine deck, which caused a hole that I plugged by glueing a piece of plastic card underneath. After I also did the other side, the engine deck plates could be installed:

[Jakko]

The wheels and bogies are now done:

Easy enough to build as such, but I’m not enamoured by the way they go together, with a “block” that you have to glue two side plates to. On one of them, the outer plate is at a slight angle that lets the wheel arms drop out too easily (they’re all still loose, I’ll only glue them in place once the bogies are attached to the hull, so I can line them out on a pane of glass). The way the skid on top is built up also not ideal: because it’s in two pieces, you get a seam at the front that requires putty. Also, Takom forgot two bolt heads on top of the return roller bracket (and four on the inside), but I only added the outside top one because all the others will be barely visible, or not at all, on the finished model.

You get two 76 mm barrels in the kit, one in plastic and the other in aluminium, with a plastic muzzle brake that fits both. When I was building that, I remembered I have a couple of others in the spares box, so here’s a comparison:

The lower one, with muzzle brake, is from this kit. The one in the middle is from Meng’s M4A3 (76 mm) VVSS kit while the top one is by RB Model. They’re lined up so at where the rear of the muzzle brake would be (or is), and as you can see, they’re all of different lengths. The main conclusion from that is that you shouldn’t just swap them if you want the gun on your model to be the correct length, but if you put a spacer behind it, both the Meng and RB barrels will fit this kit fine without showing the end of the barrel outside the gun shield.

Talking of the gun shield:

You also get two of those: one without and one with the hardware for fitting a canvas cover. The instructions for this kit only mention the “bare” shield, probably because the one for the cover was only introduced very late in the Second World War. But the kit does include all parts for the cover, and since all these Shermans in Dutch service appear to have had the cover, I used them. This does automatically put the gun at horizontal elevation, though.

BTW, the shield is apparently too flat, according to some reviews, but I can’t say it’s noticeable to me, so I left it alone instead of trying to bulk it up with putty or something.

Then to glue the gun into the shield, which is not entirely easy because it fits rather loosely. You also have to pay attention to get the muzzle brake level, as unlike the plastic barrel, the aluminium one doesn’t have any locating tabs at the ends. I ended up doing this:

Hold the turret in locking tweezers, rest those on a ledge and then put a weight on the other end of the tweezers so the barrel can stand vertically wile the glue dries

I also glued more parts to the hull:

The sand-coloured part around the bow machine gun is from an Asuka kit, because the Takom equivalent broke in two when I tried to remove it from the sprue, and the broken-off bit instantly flew off into the depths of my hobby room. But I’ve got a ton of them in my Sherman spares box, because you get two in every Asuka kit, even ones that don’t need the part at all

The blue paint is because I’ll add an Archer decal with a General Steel foundry mark there, but my experience is that these adhere very poorly on bare plastic. Putting a coat of gloss paint there first will hopefully help (likely followed by a second coat of paint over the decal to stick it down more firmly).

[Jakko]

The decal for the foundry mark:

I’ve also gotten quite far with the turret:

The hole for the little searchlight, on the front roof, has been filled because MDAP-tanks appear to have had that light removed. On the back of the turret is the transport socket for the machine gun, but Takom doesn’t appear to have realised this has a hole through it from top to bottom, so I drilled it out.

I want to have the machine gun with its barrel in the support on the roof, but Takom only gives you one that’s folded down. In my spares box, I found a raised one from Meng’s M4A3, and then I thought a figure sitting in the hatch, leaning on the gun, would look nice. One of the figures in Bronco’s British tank crew set was perfect for that, I only needed to file out the back of his right knee and lift his right arm up a little — which still needs putty to close the gap.

The commander’s cupola isn’t easy to build. The lower part with the vision blocks consists of an inner and an outer ring, but it has zero locating pins, so it’s up to you to get them aligned properly. That’s not too difficult, but with the inner part in place, I couldn’t get the vision blocks in properly. Away with the inner ring, then, as I wanted to have the hatch closed anyway. (OTOH, you do get all of the latches and things for the inside of the hatch, even including the strap to pull it shut.) And then the cupola as a whole doesn’t have any locating lugs to align it properly with the turret. This is how it’s supposed to fit:

The screw that the upper arrow points to, should align with the gap pointed to by the lower arrow. I suspect Takom thinks the cupola could rotate, but the ring with the vision blocks was screwed down into the turret roof. At best, the screws can be taken out and the whole cupola turned to a different orientation, but that puts the vision blocks in the same places, only really moving the hinge for the hatch to a new position.

[Jakko]

Here’s why you don’t need to bother fitting the engine exhausts or upper louvres:

You can’t see anything at all of them when the lower louvres are in place. I (re)made the triangular bits on the sides from plastic card — though it would have been simpler if I hadn’t cut them away in the first place, of course I thought it would be plausible for them to not be there, but it was pointed out to me that these triangles were also to be fitted in workshops, so it’s likely that most MDAP tanks would have had them, either because they were already on them or because they were fitted when the tanks were readied for MDAP delivery.

On the left is the rack with spare track links. It wasn’t that easy to build, unexpectedly, but I did succeed eventually. The white putty on the links is because I converted the T54E1 links you get in the kit to T74s by filling the two holes in the links. This is not much work for six spare track links (three here and three on the turret), but I wouldn’t want to do another 180 or so to put around the wheels. Happily, I have a full set on order, but I have no idea how long those will take to get here from Japan.

On the right is the infantry telephone, to which I added “legs” by glueing small punched discs under the supports, because the real one was on spacers and not directly attached to the hull rear plate. Because that doesn’t give much area to glue the box to the model, I also put some plastic card of the same thickness on the back, but about half the size of the box so it will largely be out of sight. The cable is also missing in the kit, but is easy to make from some copper wire plus a few bits of plastic strip for the clamps. BTW, the exact location of the box on the rear plate varied on the real tank.

After that, I made the stowage shelf:

It’s very nice, but oddly, you only get stays in the open position for it, but I found folded-up ones from Asuka in my spares box — which is why they’re green plastic instead of grey

[Jakko]

Nearly all of the etched parts are now also on:

That is, the brush guards over the headlights, horn and tail lights, and the mounting strips for the sand shields along the lower edges of the sponsons. The antenna mount on the left front turret roof is not from the kit’s etched parts, but was made from a part of the fret: drill a hole in a section of the right width, cut out the correct length, file down the ends, bend the piece in three. I annealed the middle parts of the guards over the lights etc. with a cigarette lighter (just use pliers to hold the part in the blue section of the flame and wait until the metal changes colour) to make it easier to curve into shape over the jigs provided. However, that damned cross in the horn guard … If there’s one thing about building Shermans that I really dislike, it’s making that part. It’s hard to glue the cross together right, and even harder to get it into position in the guard.

The black glue is T-7000, which makes it much easier to get these kinds of things into position than when you use superglue. One big advantage of this Takom kit over many of its competitors is that there are dimples in the hull for the legs of the guards, which makes it much easier to get them in the right position without sliding all over the place. I replaced the mirror bases by bits of plastic strip, because the actual mirrors seem to have rarely been installed on Dutch tanks.

I also added two fire extinguishers, which are spares from Asuka Sherman kits. Their locations seemed to have varied per tank, so I glued them on as per the tank in the parade, in one of the first messages in this thread. I’ve also added some of the pioneer tools, with 3D-printed straps from MJ Miniatures. Oh, and on the right side of the turret is the rack for spare track links that would normally be on the right rear of the hull, but has been replaced there by the infantry telephone. This appears to have been standard on Dutch Shermans, but was actually a modification done in the USA when the tanks being were prepared for MDAP delivery. This particular way was rare, though — more commonly, both racks on the hull rear were removed, but three spare track links were then fixed to both sides of the turret with simple brackets with bolts instead of reusing the hull racks.

[BootsDMS]

I’ve gotten behind in all this; sterling work Jakko, and an interesting subject given the time-frame; an oft overlooked period when the Cold War was as cold as it was even later (or warmer come to that). The opposition of the day? T-54s/T-55s I imagine. Just a thought - I always like to set builds in the historical context.

Anyway, keep at it, now fully engaged in this one)!)

[Hazegray]

Excellent work. I have an M4A3E8 I am starting, no where near the detailing you have done, most excellent work. I am stating out slow on a 1/72 Dragon kit, been out of touch with armor for many years. Keep up the excellent work.