Thursday, March 7, 2013

Quick Review - Open Fire! Sherman Tanks

Just a quick post to take a look at and compare Battlefront's new plastic Shermans that are found in the new starter set, Open Fire! with the rest of the BF range and with Plastic Soldier Company.





Assembly and compare with PSC. Yes they are two different model Sherman tanks but it's close enough to give you an idea of the size.


PSC M4A3 on Left, Plastic BF M4A2 on right

PSC M4A3 on Left, Plastic BF M4A2 on right

PSC M4A3 on Left, Plastic BF M4A2 on right

PSC M4A3 on Left, Plastic BF M4A2 on right
Assembling the Plastic Bf Tanks was a choir as I couldn't get the tracks and hull to mate up square. A Friend of mine found a link to another Blog that found a good method of fixing this assembly issue. See link here  Mini Kingdom

Using this method made assembly of the tanks so much easier!

Once you go through the Assembly headache you end up with  nice looking tank in BF's typically Beefy style. however there are two glaring issues with the assembly once complete. You are left with two very obvious seam line issues.

 The first is on the sides of the tank where the front glacial armor meets the hull.

The second is where the tank sides mate to the top of the hull, leaving a significant gap.

I used some Squadron green putty to fix as best I could and it does help with the final look. I'll let you judge from the pictures.


I was far more successful on the side seam then the top but still with minimum effort you can correct what I consider to be one of the bigger flaws of the model.


From the front, all plastic BF

all plastic baby!

From L to R: PSC M4A3(Late), BF Plastic M4A2, BF Resin/plastic M4A3, BF Resin M4A3(Late)

View of Plastic BF Side Seam

Top view showing side seams... not too noticable



Overall there are some  challenges to assembling these tanks and it does require some modification to produce an acceptable result. Ultimately, with a little care and love these babies can look great on the table.

3 comments:

  1. Nice job painting them and repairing the seams. I have the Open FIre tanks too and the top seam drives me crazy. I like the squared off look at the top of the hull and the bulge and seam there on the battlefront models really bothers me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would say that the top seams are the worst part of the model and the hardest to fix with greenstuff as it's very easy to ruin the molded on deck tools, etc.

      The side seams are not bad and are much easier to fix.

      Delete