M4 (105 mm) HVSS Sherman

Last year, I bought a box full of parts and conversion kits that someone else had intended to turn into an M4 (105 mm) VVSS Sherman. I used some of these to build a retro M4A3 (76 mm) VVSS that you may have seen on Missing-Lynx, but that still left me with basically all of the M4 hull and 105 mm turret parts, as well as a bunch of other stuff. I decided to use them to build an M4 (105 mm) HVSS tank using an Asuka hull and suspension, which I mail-ordered direct from Asuka in Japan. The basic parts, then, are these:


Though I’m sure I’ll need to delve into my Sherman spares box for some more.

Soon after I actually started on this model yesterday, I discovered my choice of parts could have been better. I had bought an M4 Composite lower hull, largely because it’s correct for the M4 (105 mm) too, but would have been better off with an M4A3 HVSS hull. It would have been much easier to convert the lower rear plate to that of an M4 than the work I ended up having to do on the hull sides :frowning:

For starters, I had to file five chamfered areas into the bottom edge, which are there on the real tank so the hubs of the inner wheels won’t bump into the hull when they get pushed all the way up. I measured them in Asuka instructions for an HVSS Sherman kit and converted the measurements to the hull sides parts, which was straightforward enough to do. Some filing and scraping later, I had the chamfered edges alright.

Once that was done, I discovered the real problem: the HVSS bogies don’t mount to the hull in the same way as the VVSS ones that the kit parts are intended for. Basically, there are three mounting plates with bolt heads moulded to each hull side, but for the HVSS bogies, the whole side needs to be flat. As I was working on this at a model show/meet, I didn’t have all my normal tools at hand, which made this rather more difficult than I had expected. I started by filing one of the mounting plates down, but that was a ton of work that I didn’t care to repeat, so for the next one, I cut through the hull from the inside (there’s a recess slightly smaller than the mounting plate there) and then filed down the bits remaining on the outside. This was also a lot of work, but less strenuous than filing the whole thing down even if it took about as long, so I also did the third that way. After that one, though, I had had enough for the day and moved on to building the bogies :slight_smile:

Today, back home and with all of my tools available, I decided to tackle the fourth by sawing through it with the saw held flat against the hull side. This kind of slices off the mounting plate, after which I filed down the remains again, which altogether was less work than either of the other two methods, so I also used it for the other two. I then sanded the hull sides to get rid of the worst of the file marks. In all of this, the bolt heads at the front edge of the hull sides also got obliterated, but hey, those are easy to replace later.

The moral of this story is to put more thought into things before buying :slight_smile: A fellow modeller at the model show suggested it would be simpler to replace the whole hull sides with plastic card, and I agree with him — had I done that before starting to remove the mounting plates, that is. By the time he put forward this thought, I was already so far in that I estimated it would be about as much work as finishing what I already had. Now that I’ve finished, I still think that was pretty accurate.

Once I had built a bogie, I then discovered that the two holes that were now in the hull side, are higher than the bogies’ mounting plates … So, I glued a bit of plastic strip into the hole, as you can see in the photo above. With a bogie against the hull, it looks like this:
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Measuring an Asuka M4A3 HVSS model I had already built, it does turn out that the bogies are at the correct height this way. I was afraid that they would be too low because the hull is the wrong type, but luckily, they aren’t.

And all of the bogies:

I will add here, for those building Asuka HVSS Shermans, that the best way to build them is not per the instructions:

These tell you to first fit the shock absorber B14 to the roadwheel arms B13, but it’s much better to build the bracket B2/B3/B12 first, then fit arms B13 (with B15) without glue and secure them in place with B10. After that, you can slip the springs B6 between them and only then add the shock absorber without needing three or four hands to keep everything together.

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Looks like a fun build! Some A3 sides would have saved a lot of effort, but where’s the fun in that? :grin:

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Looks like a great project Jakko, I’ll be tagging along.
(Still have to assemble the right side tracks for my M4 / 105, then I can start painting!)

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Jakko, did M4/105 tanks with composite hull and HVSS suspension serve in Europe? I don’t think I’ve seen a picture of one…

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To be honest, this is the kind of thing I enjoy building :slight_smile: Yes, removing those mounting plates was a pain, but I’m happy with how it came out. Now to fit all the other stuff together that isn’t meant to — I mean, the upper hull is supposed to fit on an Italeri M4A1 lower hull, the sponson blanking plates are for the Tamiya M4, the turret is intended for a plastic hull (I’m guessing Tamiya) and so needs a larger turret opening than the resin hull has … Oh yeah, and I need to convert an Asuka round nose to a pointed nose :slight_smile:

There were no composite hull tanks with either 105 mm howitzers or HVSS, are there? At least, not new-builds — maybe some were cobbled together from parts?

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A really interesting project. Will be watching.

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I didn’t think so

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As expected, the resin hull doesn’t fit the plastic one:

That, of course, is simply because the resin is much thicker than the plastic of the hull that’s supposed to fit there. In the end I had to prune the lower hull quite a bit before things fit like they should:

About a millimetre from the sides of the firewall, which drops the upper hull a lot because it rests on the very edges, and about 2 to 2.5 mm from all the top edges, as well as rounding off some of the corners.

For the nose, my first plan was to use the Formations one you can see at lower left of the second photo at the start of this thread, but that’s meant for Tamiya or Italeri, and though it will fit the Asuka hull, I would need to remove the teardrop-shaped plates on the sides and glue supports in the hull top keep it in place. Plan B was to take a rounded nose from Asuka, of which you get one in every kit of an early Sherman that also includes a three-piece nose, so you quickly have one or more of them as spares. On Missing-Lynx, I found a cross-section drawing of the “sharp” nose, which made for an obvious a solution: trace over that on my computer, print it out at 1:35 scale, paste it to thin card, cut it out, and you’ve got a template for shaping the nose with putty etc.

That proved to be easier said than done :frowning: The round nose appears to be more bulbous on the underside than the sharp one, and no matter how much I filed it down, I couldn’t get it down far enough to put the template in the right position. I don’t understand why, but it just didn’t want to work, and I soon had taken so much off the underside that it would need a lot more work to make the underside presentable again. (It would have been better to just trim the template to fit the underside of the rounded nose, but you only realise that once you discover it’s too late for that.)

Time for plan C:

A sharp nose from Dragon, side plates from Asuka and a strip with bolts of unknown origin but certainly not the one that should go with this nose. The Dragon nose is a millimetre too narrow for the lower hull, but because the Asuka plates have chamfered inner edges while the Dragon nose doesn’t, I could glue them to it and have everything end up at the correct width — leaving a big gap between the green and the grey plastic:

Then I filled the gaps and once that had dried, sanded away some of the texture to tone it down a little because it’s a bit overdone, but left some of it still. I also applied texture with some thinned putty and a stiff brush to the filled areas:

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This is such a heroic build! Watching each update on the edge of my seat…

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It’s rather more work than I expected it to be — but to be fair, it feels like every model I build ends up that way :slight_smile:

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On the nose, I added the pins for the tow cables, the steps for the crew and the housings for the drive sprocket axles. The pins are just a length of plastic rod cut and filed so it fits between the lugs, with the ends made from a punched disc and a bit of square rod.

The hull sides now have the bolts again that got obliterated by all the filing, made with a hex punch and die set from RP Toolz — one of those tools that makes you wonder how you did without, once you’re used to having it :slight_smile:

At the back, I put on the rear hull plate and the idler wheel mounts. I’ve not yet decided if I want to build it with or without deep-wading gear, so I didn’t add an engine door yet because that would be wasted effort if I do decide to go for the wading gear.

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There’s a bit of a problem with the dimensions of the Armoured Brigade Models turret: when I put it onto the hull, it proved to be clearly too long front-to-back but slightly too narrow side-to-side. Comparing it to an Asuka turret, the difference is obvious:

It’s only about a millimetre and a half, but that’s enough to prevent the turret from fitting on the hull at all. With the front in the correct position, it sticks out so far at the back that it would sit on top of the lid over the air intake, which of course would be impossible. It can’t even fit between the front of the splash guard and the air intake lid. To get it to sit reasonably well, I filed it down at the front and rear:

It won’t really turn, though, because it’s also too thick on the left front (you can see it just about hits the splash guard there) but that will be very difficult to correct, so I’ll probably leave it like this. I was planning to fit the interior parts, but I’ll leave them out after all. Instead, I will glue the turret directly to the hull later on, and likely use the interior parts on an Asuka M4A3 (105 mm) kit that I’m sure I’ll end up building someday :slight_smile:

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Because I want to build a tank with HVSS, I need to modify a few things on the glacis plate. The hull is pretty much 100% correct for an M4 with VVSS, but the ones with HVSS had slightly later details than the kit hull has: the bullet deflectors in front of the fixed periscopes were narrower on the late hulls, the lifting eyes were further outboard, and the top edge of the glacis plate was not bevelled. That last bit is to say: until then, the upper edge was cut so it was horizontal when the glacis plate was on the tank, but to simplify production, this was changed to just cutting it square, leaving an edge at the top of the plate. For an M4 (105 mm) VVSS tank, and also for very early HVSS ones, you can leave these as the ABM hull provides them, but I had to modify all of this. Furthermore, ABM made a small mistake, which you can’t really blame them for because hardly anybody realised this until fairly recently: they put the hinges for the barrel crutch centrally, when on the real tank they were offset to the left a little because the howitzer barrel is offset to the left in the turret as well.

Here, I’ve circled the locating points for the lifting eye, which needs to be shifted outboard a little. I just sanded them away on both sides.

At the top, the two pairs of vertical lines show the parts of the bullet deflectors that must be cut and scraped away, to basically put them level with the rest of the top of the glacis plate, so that an edge can be put onto this. I made that edge from a piece of 1 mm square rod that I scraped to a triangular cross-section, and then glueing it to the hull with the flat I scraped on it facing down.

The vertical lines show at the bottom shows the centreline of the barrel, and therefore, where that ofd the gun crutch needs to be as well. As you can see from the ruler, the hinges are not in the right places. (Determining where that line had to go required a bit of improvisation, BTW. I put the hull onto a piece of lined paper, put the turret with mantlet and gun on that and made sure it was pointing dead forward, then put a machinist’s square on one of the lines on the paper and moved the hull so the barrel was touching it and the hull was parallel to the lines on the paper.) Then I added a pencil line above the hinges and sawed them off with one of those razorblade saws that makes a very thin cut. After that, I could file away the remains and determine where to glue the hinges by putting an Asuka gun crutch against the hull on the correct centreline.

All in all, you end up with something like this:

As you can see in the picture, I also replaced the ring around the bow machine gun by one in plastic from an Asuka kit that I had in my spares box. This was for the simple reason that the Asuka part is better, since it has little studs that represent where the canvas cover foer the machine gun attaches (as that’s what this thing is for).

The white strips at the top still need to be filed and puttied to hopefully blend seamlessly into the glacis plate.

And then a quick couple of things for the engine deck:

I added filler caps and a ventilator cover from my spares box, again all Asuka parts. You get both in the ABM hull kit, but you have to saw the filler caps from a resin sprue, which is more effort than just taking them from a spares box — I’ve got literally a couple dozen of them from various makers’ M3 and M4 medium tank kits, all left over because they give you more caps than the model actually needs.

The ventilator cover is because the ABM set provides one with bolts equally spaced around the outside, but that’s only correct for a very specific production run of Shermans. The vast majority had a cover like the one here, with unevenly spaced bolts. The reason is that this way, all of the bolts screw into the flat plate that the cover sits on; with equal spacing, two of them would screw into the sloping plate that forms the sponson roof, meaning the bolts would have to be longer and anyone removing them would need to take care to get the right bolt in the right place.

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WOW Jakko, a ton of work, and all of it excellent. I admire your determination and craftsmanship.

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Amazing work so far… Keep up the good work. :+1:

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TOADMAN’S TANK PICTURES IRANIAN M4A3 (105) HVSS

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You wouldn’t if you could see me do the work :wink:

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Jakko, I feel like you’re my brother from another mother, the way you wiggle around making things work together when it would have been easier another way, but where’s the fun in that?

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It’s one of those cases of: I’ve got all of these bits, I had a plan for what to do with them, and then a plastic kit manufacturer kind of spoils it by announcing (almost) this in a single box … So let’s go on regardless! :slight_smile:

The much easier way to build this M4 variant would be to wait for the Asuka M4A3 (105 mm) VVSS kit to be released, then buy the suspension, an M4A3 HVSS lower hull and an M4 engine deck from Asuka, and graft them together with some minor other work (like changing the angle of the upper hull rear, repositioning the lifting eyes, etc.). Or, of course, to buy an Italeri M4A1 for its lower hull, that the ABM upper hull is actually intended to fit on … That would be a ton less work, too.

The one thing I don’t understand, though, is why the ABM turret doesn’t fit the ABM hull. The only turret that’s correct for this type of M4 is the 105 mm one, and ABM had both but they don’t fit together. Why?

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Excellent work so far Jakko, you’ve cleared a number of sizable hurdles to get to this point, carry on !

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