RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Good Afternoon, Louis!
I had wanted one of these Kits. To have a Lee or Grant to round out my Sherman squad still appears to be a way off. It is cool to observe a Master at work, crafting parts out of basic styrene. Amazing stuff! Following along!
regards,
Painless

Hi,
Thank you everyone for your interest, it makes me want to do a better job. I remember a few years ago when i built my first Vandra M3. It seems much simpler now. Skills do improve with practice. Here i am, now building the whole turret from scratch. I would not know how to do this just a couples of years ago.

Presenting progress on the turret. It is not finished but getting there.

The M3 Lee is equipped with a hull mounted 75mm gun, a 37mm and browning M1919 on turret and another M1919 in the cupola. It makes a lot of armament for a RC board. Sadly, RC boards only have 1 recoil. I decided to install a Clark TK40 on this model. It allow for one main gun recoil, flash and sound, but has 2 machine guns. So, i had to choose whether to give the recoil to the 37mm or the 75mm. I decided to give it to the 75mm which should be given elevation and horizontal movement, it will have a unique aspect. The turret will have two operational machine guns, not bad.

Now, the turret. As you can see, the cast turret has a rough aspect that is important for me to replicate.
The mantlet is especially complicated with the main gun and visor moving together. Notice the bolted plate with slotted bolt heads, this is important.
The Vandra kit mantlet is too small for the new turret, a new mantlet needs to be made in plasticard. However, i did salvage the gun mount resin parts from the Vandra kit and beefed them up to fit the new mantlet.
The mantlet is complicated and is slowly being assembled. The Miniart mantlet is used as reference, along with the Squadron book M3 Lee Walk Around and the GunPower 32 M3 Lee/Grant book. Notice the new gun mount axel made of various material on hand.
It is made of overlapping carbon fiber tubes purchased on eBay from China. Overlapping tubes in increasing sizes are used to build up the gun mount until the desired size is reached. Notice the size of the original resin gun mount, reused in the core. Its important to have overlapping tube material for such builds, they make easy solutions possible.
The gun mount extents to the visor, which moves with it.
If you want something to look like the real thing, build it like the real thing.
As seen in other of my builds, an Aber M1919 has its barrel length replaced by a brass tube with a fiber optics inside. The tip of the Aber barrel is kept and drilled to accept the fiber. This makes nice machine guns for WW2 US tanks.
The Browning is installed on the gun mount, on the left of the main gun position. The LED is inside a aluminum tube and will connect to the fibre optics. I drilled a corresponding hole in the LED body for the fiber cable to fill the slot for a good connection to transmit the light.
Overview of the mantlet.
Continuing on following post.

View inside the mantlet, before installation of the braces that will keep the gun mount in place. I forgot to picture them. They were made in plasticard with a groove for the axel.
Gun elevation is provided by a simple arrangement with a micro servo.
By some sheer luck, the hole for the turret is exactly the size of a small Heng Long rotation wheel. It slides right in, wow, i really did not plan for this to be so easy. All i had to do to make it fit is grind the resin a bit on the rear armored plate for the teeth to clear the wall.
The height of the rotation wheel going up across to the hull top was adjusted to be flush with the turret sitting on it, and bolted with hex screws to plasticard spacers glued to the bottom of the turret.

Rotation is provided by a large high quality 360 continuous rotation servo with a small VEX robotics gear on top of the servo point. The servo fits right against the side armor, taking very limited space. It is simply glued there to the wall with a few drops of superglue. No need for fancy interior arrangement, the highlight of this build is not the interior. The servo works extremely well in both direction, with speed control, and is a good replacement of home made rotation gizmos. I will provide a video on the following post.
I purchased a compass cutter on Amazon for a few dollars. How could i live without this little miracle tool for so long.
Here is the turret and mantlet. The turret was unevenly applied a coat of Testors putty with a finger, let to dry and sanded a bit. It looks like a mess at first but after some sanding, it gives a good representation of the cast metal look and feel of the M3 turret.
The mantlet was mounted on the turret like the real thing, screwed with small slotted head bolt screws from Knupfer in Germany. I can remove the mantlet the same way it was put in. Small screws sold for glasses repair could be of the right size but they have a Phillips head, not ideal for authenticity.

The Vandra resin gun was kept, it is good but was warped at one place, i straiten it by warming it at the problem point over boiling water. The rectangular Vandra resin body for the gun was reused after beefing it up with plasticard on the sides to fit the enlarged turret.
Continuing on following post.

The mount for the cupola is prepared.
Close up on the mantlet.
Close up on the Testors putty cast finish. The Vandra small hatch was cut from the kit turret and reused.
The rear area for the cupula to sit on is ready. I will try to give it some rotation.
Close up on the turret rotation. It is a Feetech FS5103R Continuous Servo purchased for a few dollars at Robotshop.com. It is always good to have a couple of these on inventory. It is connected to the turret rotation servo port on the TK40. As with any 360 servo, the idle neutral point needs to be found by turning the adjustment screw inside a small hole on the servo side. It took me a bit of time to find that process the first time i used these servos for rotation. Notice the small Vex Gear that had a hole drilled in it to fit the servo head size.
Overview of the model as it stands today. Next step is to create the cupola and finalize the detailing of the turret.
And finally, here is a short video of the turret testing

https://youtu.be/_-6iUoPNOdg

link above.
Regards, Louis

Your skill is kiling me!
Excellent job done and as you mentioned it is still a shame nobody cares to make accurate allied tanks compared to all the swears when the big cats are concerned.

Following this build , much more interesting than out of the box builds. Have a look at this from the Elmod help site, video of servo setups on the fusion pro board. https://www.rceifel.de/forum/index.php? ... -3-servos/

Exceptional, well done Louis!

Barry

Wow Louis, your level of commitment is astounding.
Bravo Sir

Hi, thank you very much everyone. The build is going well, one item at a time.

Presenting the cupola.

The cast M3 Lee cupola is complicated. Its not surprising that both conversion kits i know on the market have conveniently ignored it. It is equipped with a M1919 Browning machine gun on the left port, not present on the picture below.
A look at those side visors is enough to discouraged most modelers. Some simplification is required if i want to avoid getting bugged down by complexity and desperation.
The Shapeways offering is obviously simplified and made to quickly plug a hole on a vendor's M3 turret that is even smaller than the Vandra kit. I am thinking it might fit the Haya turret but not sure. It is not 1/16 scale and cannot be used on this build even if i wanted to. Its too small and the detail level does not fit this build. The cupola therefore need to be scratchbuilt.
The Miniart cupola and reference pictures were studied to find a way to attack its construction. Shape and dimensions are extrapolated from 1/35. Basic core components are made.
Construction is proceeding in a telescopic fashion.
Getting there. It will be equipped with an Aber barrel with a fiber optic for flash. I decided to forget about giving movement to this cupola. Besides, i am out of channels for servos for it.
Aluminum tubing of various sizes is important, being solid without being as strong as brass.
The hours passes, every item need some engineering.
After about what i think is close to 10 hours of work, the cupola is ready.
Continuing on following post.

Here is a walk around of the cupola with close ups.
Looking at these close ups for the first time, i am noticing some issues, fine tuning is required here and there.
Like the turret, It was applied with a layer of Testors putty to simulate the cast effect. Its quite dusty.
I reused the Vandra hatch hinges. Even after reducing them dramatically, they still look too big. They will need some more rework.
Here is the vehicle as it stands today. Having an M3 with a cupola was important for this build.
Regards, Louis