T34 engine trouble #4

Building the turret

The turret, more or less, got a complete overhaul. The Zvezda turret is supposed to be quite accurate straight from the box, except for the gunner’s sight being too close to hatch hinge. I also decided to add the barrel and resin mantlet from Armorscale (#B35-066; 76.2mm F34 gun barrel for soviet tank with hexagonal turret) to improve the detail quality, as well have my first experience with an Armorscale product.

With the Armorscale pieces in place, it looks great in my own opinion, but I wasn’t totally overwhelmed with the quality. The huge casting block wasn’t fun to remove; parts of it being rock hard, and other parts being as soft as butter. The placement hole in the mantlet had also to be enlarged to allow the barrel to be fitted. A lot of work was needed for something that is supposed to ease assembly.

The plate where the gunner’s sight was attached to was scrapped off and a new one made from some plastic sheet. This was then moved forward slightly. The side vision ports were solid pieces, so these were glued in place and then opened using a small drill bit and a knife. I then added Mr. Surfacer 500 around the whole turret to give it some texture plus to fill out around the vision ports. Finally I added weld detail according to some reference images using magic sculpt and a hypodermic needle, using the Lee Lloyd method.