RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Not sure I'd call the Tamiya Sherman the gold standard. Some of their tanks are, but the M4 was a very early release. But for the HVSS suspension it is the Gold standard in my opinion.

I'm sure you know, but Oddball's and Garners' tanks were VVSS. Swapping a HL, Mato, Taigen upper hull onto a Tamiya is not too tough a job (but a Tamiya upper the HL lower is more difficult - lots of trimming). Many of the builds here involve swapping hulls and in some cases just the suspension and drives from the Tammy to HL lower. I've used a Tamiya Sherman upper just twice out of 14 M4 and variants. It has a much larger turret ring than most of the others, which requires building an adaptor or finding a T23 turret to fit the Tamiya upper.

Taigen is nice stuff in my book for what it sells for. It does seem that after Eric left the company, the new tank development slowed to a crawl. One would think with the popularity of Fury, the constant lambasting the piss poor quality of the Hooben offering, that one of the better companies that do have a nice Sherman with VVS on it, would tool up a nice M4A3E8 version. I like ready to run, painted and weathered, but not afraid to build a Tamiya kit if thats the current best way to do a HVSS Sherman. I see no real outward interest from any of the other companies to offer one. Hooben keeps saying they have metal upgrade parts coming to fix the fragile HVSS parts on their M4A3E8, but its going on 4 years of empty promises I am told. They are chasing the toy market in China were the tanks never see anything but hard smooth floors with mostly indoor competition with kids.