This is a Sherman Crab with registration number T148656, of 1 Lothians and Border Yeomanry, 30 Armoured Brigade, 79th Armoured Division (the famous “Funnies”). The photograph dates from circa 1945, after the war was over but the tank still stood in a village street — with six other tanks around it, one of which is visible in the background, and many other tanks and other vehicles in the immediate area.
Some years ago, I decided to build a model of T148656 as it stood after the war, rather than as it was during it. Photographs of it are relatively plentiful, given its location, and with those and historical documents, as well as help from other people, I managed to trace its history in pretty good detail. Still, I had to guess at some details and got a few wrong as a result — as is typical, photos surfaced afterward that showed some of my assumptions to have been incorrect. Oh, well.
The basis of the model is an Asuka Sherman V (M4A4) kit plus the Resicast Crab Mk. I conversion kit, to which I added the Resicast Sherman V deep-wading set and 75 mm gun M3 as well as Panda Plastic T48 tracks. Add to that a good deal of corrections and scratchbuilding both to replicate this particular tank and fix accuracy or assembly issues.
Because the real tank stood with two of its three hatches open, my model needed an interior. This is the transmission from the Academy M36 tank destroyer, with white plastic to modify it into a three-piece — that doesn’t just have flanges with bolts on the outside of the tank, but also on the inside. Because the assistant driver’s hatch would be closed, though, I only added bolts where they might be visible through the driver’s hatch.
Because of the weight of the mine-flail, the Crab’s suspension units are usually compressed. Luckily, Asuka’s suspension is entirely moveable and comes with different thicknesses of spacer plates to go inside, which lets you adjust the ride height. As the photo shows, I built the front unit on each side compressed quite far, the middle one is in more or less neutral position and the last one is in its highest position. The No. 5 wheel is missing because it was on the real tank, too — you can just see this in the photo of the real tank at the top of this article.
(The metal thing sticking up is a square that I used as a handy weight in the hull. The bogies are only stuck on with Blu-Tack yet, for ease of painting later.)
In photos taken later on, when the tank was being moved to a new location, the fifth wheel arm was held up with a chain. I first made a bunch of links by winding copper wire around a piece of plastic strip, cutting through them and hooking them into each other before attaching the resulting chain to the bogie.
Trust me when I say this was rather more of a job than that sentence makes it appear :)
A major feature inside the Crab is the chain case, which sits directly behind the assistant driver’s seat and protects the crew from the bicycle-type chains that drive the flail. I had to scratchbuild this, of course, using drawings from the Crab’s manual and photographs, both kindly supplied by a fellow modeller :) For anyone else contemplating putting an interior into a Crab, here’s a drawing I made to build mine:
I didn’t build a complete interior, only the bits that will show through the open hatches (plus a bit more to be on the safe side). The driver’s compartment is finished here, with the dashboard and some stowage box, the uprights inside the hull, the chain case, and some more odds and ends. On the firewall I added the radiators and something resembling the drive shaft, but nothing else because it would be hidden under the turret basket.
In the left sponson, the ammunition rack would be visible, and because T148656 didn’t have any appliqué armour plates on the hull, it would have been an unprotected rack. This is a decent approximation of the only part of it that will be visible through the driver’s hatch. The wavy part is aluminium strip that I bent into shape using some cocktail sticks and the tray of a set of modelling drills:
The turret basket was tricky to get right, but luckily I have the technical manual for the M4 and M4A1 from 1942, which helped a lot (you can find PDFs of these and others online, but the photos are often clearer in the real books). This is the turret floor, made from a disc of plastic card, another disc of card with anti-slip texture and a ring, all made with a circle cutter.
After assembling the floor, I added struts from plastic strip and glued it to Asuka’s lower turret part.
And then began adding more detail, based on the manual and photos I found online. Most of it’s scratchbuilt, of course: the grating around it is photoetch from Aber, the seats come with the Asuka kit, and almost everything else is either plastic card or strip, aluminium, or bits from the spares box that I modified. The 75 mm round is actually for a “pack” howitzer, and is just there for size — it’s not glued or anything.
This is the traverse mechanism, again built by referring to the M4/M4A1 manual. It’s actually the second attempt, as I misjudged dimensions first time round and made it too tall to fit inside the turret.
The interior of the lower part of the turret complete, minus the gunner’s seat, which I only added after painting.
The visible bits on the inside of the turret wall, below the commander’s hatch. In retrospect, of course, I should have left off the holster and the seat cushions at the very least, since these tanks very quickly got stripped of anything and everything usable to the local people.
Resicast’s 75 mm gun could also use a few additions, mainly the elevating gear. It also took a little work to make it fit the Asuka gun shield, but I had to because Resicast’s shield doesn’t fit the Asuka turret.
Once everything was done, I could paint the interior.
All of this is deliberately dirty and rusty, as the model represents the tank as it had stood outside for over two and a half years, with hatches open and people (both local children and tourists) climbing over and in any time they liked. A few hundred metres from the sea, at that.
The interior painted, I glued the upper hull to the lower and started work on the flail. This photo shows the basic supports for it on the tank.
The flail has a blast shield, which Resicast provides as a resin piece that needs to be heated and then bent to shape. I’m not fond of heating resin and bending it, so I instead copied it from aluminium sheet with plastic card for the thicker part.
This is the blast shield with the pipes that it sits between. The pieces of “angle iron” are plastic strip because although Resicast provides these, it has moulded them the wrong way around, so I cut some new ones. You also get the hoops that go around the beams from Resicast, but I’d rather trust in bent copper wire than very thin resin. Of course, that wire still needs to be cut to length here on three of the four.
Most of the flail mechanism is in place here, except for the actual flail chains. I added more angle “iron” to the flail because that’s visible in photos of the real tank.
Resicast provides these reinforcing strips in etched brass, but it’s much quicker to just make them from plastic strip and a few punched bolt heads.
On the back, I added the chute from Resicast’s deep-wading set. The real tank would have lacked the removable lid, but I didn’t feel like making this whole thing myself from plastic card so I decided to take some artistic licence and leave it on.
I didn’t use the resin part for the air intake, though, because that was covered in waterproofing cloth which was not present anymore in any photos of the derelict tank that I know of. So, I built what was underneath that cloth from plastic card, copper wire and the grille from the Resicast set.
The real tank had an odd stowage bin on the right side of the hull, which also appears in photos of a small handful of other Crabs. It originally had lids, but somebody repurposed those at some point, so they’re not on my version. (The brown paint is because those areas would be hard to reach with an airbrush later.)
I also replaced all the tool brackets with aluminium strip, as of course there were no tools on these tanks anymore.
These are the marker light bins. In one photo it’s clear that the left-hand bin was missing its lid, so I scratchbuilt a copy of the Resicast part, but used the resin one on the right. This is one of the mistakes I mentioned earlier: I later found a photo that showed that both were without lids. Also, as you can see in the photo, I put a rectangular thingy inside the bin, when that should really be on the outside (facing the tank).
This shows the bins on the tank, as well as the folded station-keeping lights. Those are also entirely scratchbuilt because Resicast’s brass brackets proved useless and the lights themselves were the wrong type (real Crabs had a number of different ones). Also notice the B166 ammunition box in front of the left-hand marker light bin.
In front of that box, on the left of the tank, was half a folding stowage rack — probably for spare flail chains. The rear part remained but the front one had obviously been lost at some point. The white putty represents the weld scars that remained.
Back to the last bogie, because in photos there was something there, wedged between the chain somehow. Though I still don’t know what it was, exactly, or what it was for, I figure it was a piece of wood that was tied to the bogie. I had to loosen the chain, add the wood and then re-attach the chain in a different way to get it to fit.
This is the model after construction was finished, though still minus its tracks, of course. Those were simply assembled straight from the box bag, though.
The bright green and dull brown bits of paint are where I applied Arched casting mark decals to the model. I didn’t want to apply them to the bare plastic because wet transfers don’t usually stick well to that, so I painted the necessary areas bright gloss green first. I then found that they still wanted to come off, so I painted some brown over them to stick them down better.
Then on to painting. I first sprayed it olive drab, then added lighter patches in the centres of panels etc. and followed that by an overall darker wash and lighter drybrush.
The star on the back deck was sprayed with a template I made by drawing it on the computer and printing then cutting it out. The circle was done in two parts, but that didn’t work as well as I had intended — as you can see, the overlapping parts are clearly brighter than the areas where there’s only one coat of paint, and they didn’t align too well in any case.
And then the model languished for a year and a half or so, largely because I just wanted something else to do and because of the difficulty of making the flail chains. Resicast only supplies the ones that look like oversized bicycle chains, because those can actually be cast in resin, but my subject had chains that were half that and half shackles, plates and links.
When I mentioned this on a forum, somebody went out of his way for me to measure up a real Crab’s flail chain and 3D-print the individual pieces in resin!
That’s all the bits he sent me. It took me a while to work up the courage to put them together …
That’s one chain made: all of the 3D-printed parts cleaned up, the holes in them drilled out, and then slid onto 0.5 mm brass rod, which I trimmed to size after putting a drop of superglue on both sides. The greenish part on the right is a cut-down Resicast flail chain with a hole drilled through the end.
One down, forty more to go …
I was very happy that I decided to model the tank at a time when all the spare flail chains had long been pilfered …
In this photo they also have the little brass tabs glued to them that are supplied with the Resicast set to attach the chains to the flail drum.
And then more details came to light. The Asuka kit comes with flat cover flaps for the periscopes, but my subject had “roof-shaped” ones. Another friend with a 3D printer printed me up some, and I had a fun time cutting off the old ones so I could replace them. I also discovered more details about the sheet-metal surround for the gun shield, that the canvas dust cover attached to, so I also added that from plastic strip. All of which, of course, then needed to be painted to match the rest of the model.
At this point in building the model, the real T148656 had been restored to presentable condition and was replaced on its plinth. (Which I was involved in slightly, mainly in ensuring the markings are historically correct as far as possible, though not 100% because of all the missing bits. Oh, and in providing a drawing of the correct shape for the front mudguards.)
I weathered the model to look dirty from standing out in all weathers for a couple of years, mainly with washes and drybrushing of dirt and rust colours, as well as adding stains where they show on the photos of the real tank. This also worked very well to camouflage the not-so-great star on the engine deck. By carefully adding stains and “worn” paint, it looks perfectly OK now.
The light green line on the side, towards the front, is also visible in photos. The registration number had been painted out for some unknown reason (but there is a suspicion of this having been done to commit fraud with the number of tanks actually cut up for scrap, as there was a government subsidy on this…).
The markings on the rear, copied as closely as possible from one of the few photographs available of the rear of the tank. The 79 Armoured Division emblem is from Star Decals, the arm of service marking of 52 comes from my spares box and the red cross is from the Asuka kit. The rest is hand-painted, clearly: CHERRY was the assault group the tank was part of, while the landing craft it was carried in (which was LCT 650) had No. 6 within Operation Infatuate II.
On the front are much the same markings but on the end of the right-hand jib. Interestingly, photos show that it originally had AoS number 51, but the 1 had been overpainted with a 2. The tank’s registration number was also painted on the transmission housing, indicating that it had been parked in a row with others at some point, perhaps at a vehicle dump or a repair facility.
On the right, T148656 carried its registration number twice: the original would have been the one inside the stowage bin, and the other must have been added when the bin was installed. These are Archer dry transfers from a set of generic British vehicle numbers.
After adding the flail chains, I could finally call the model done!
To really finish it off, I built a couple of little children as if they’re playing with the chains — inspired by a comment long ago by an aunt of mine, that when she was young, they used to swing the balls on the chains against the tank because it made such a tremendous noise!