I guess I’m officially all over the place now. I sat down to do some turret details on the Cr1 last night, which meant making space, and I ended up playing with the Esci M1.
I do however have some space at the desk now…
Dont know if anyone knows this or not the Tamiya hull is a hair longer than the Rye Field hull how i found out i wanted to back date a RFM M1A1 to the early production one with the early style wheels and T156 chevrons by mating the RFM upper hull to the tamiya lower hull and thats when i fould out the tamiya hull is longer dont remember how much though
So thats probably why you had to put a shim on the rear hull plate of the esci upper hull
I don’t have any RFM parts in either of these…
Both lower hulls are Tamiya.
I got a RFM lower hull thats excess your welcome to it
I appreciate the offer but I’ve got a bunch of Tamiya and Academy parts and a couple of spare kits, probably ought not to introduce any more manufacturer’s parts into the mix.
Id like to attempt to kit bash the chrylser XM1 prototype
Any idea exactly what “weld line in excess of 2 feet” means ?
A guess? The “boxes” on the cheek armor contained multiple layers of ceramics, alloys, and other materials. The implication is that if it took two feet of weld to enclose that space, there might be two feet of Chobham up front.
Declassified drawings and physical measurements confirm the base M1 turret cheeks have a physical thickness of roughly 700 mm to 800 mm depending on the exact angle of attack.
That looks about right! I’m pretty sure that’s what the sign meant.
I had a moment last Friday night. Given a couple of free hours, I thought it would be a good idea to do the blow-off panels on the M1 (Esci kit) so I started checking references and realized the ones on the Tamiya kit would need to be charged. Rats. I had the turret mostly done and was going to have to grind and sand on that very brittle old plastic without destroying the surrounding detail.
I didn’t mess up much, nothing a bit of thinned MrSurfacer couldn’t fix…
Looking good!
Just got back from two weeks in Alaska, fishing and visiting grandkids, gonna start painting my pile of M1’s soon, probably gonna start with my A4 Bradley though
I’m still not feeling the urge to paint… 
I had some bench time last night and got the M1 blow-off panels and headlight guards done, and made up some stowed camo nets for each.
And while I was there, I added some detail to the tops of the skirts for each, visible in the pic of the IPM1.
Would the original Tamiya M1 be a good starting point to backdate to a XM1?
I suppose it could be done. The only things I would say would count against it are the very brittle plastic which makes it seem delicate if handled rough, and cost. It seems they’ve become somewhat collectible.
That and the tracks, so three things that stand out to me.
If I do another early M1 I’ll use an Academy hull, a Panda turret (available on eBay on occasion) and CRS tracks.
O happy day! More goodies from CRS showed up today.
All ready for primer:
IMG_5255 by Russel Baer, on Flickr
Then they both got Citadel Chaos black for primer and after 30 minutes or so a covering coat of Tamiya AS-13, USAF green. That’s a really dark green, so to break it up just a little bit, all horizontal surfaces got a very light misting with Vallejo US OD.
IMG_5266 by Russel Baer, on Flickr
