RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Good morning,
Good day,
Good evening,
to ervery one ......

The next M5A1 is being converted.
It is to be a Stuart in British service, like this:


But first some improvements are necessary to increase durability:


Then come the finishing touches to spruce up the look....


ABER 3,7 cm Barrel and Cal.30 with fibre optics


Turret with welding seams and some details ist coloured with olive drab....


thanks for watching and see you soon......

Nice! I had metal bushings in the idler wheels. Was yours just plastic?

Kaczor wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2024 7:19 am Nice! I had metal bushings in the idler wheels. Was yours just plastic?

Metal bushes were also installed, these can be seen to the right of the wheel in the picture.
But these rub/run on the thread of the screw, and this is a very bad combination!
3 ball bearings fit into the wheel without reworking, so no more problems are to be expected.

Edit: my 1000. posting

Herr Hamm: After some checking on the electronics on my Coolbank M5 (see: viewtopic.php?p=360178#p360178), with a mountain of projects piling up, and money tightening, I decided to have fun and just put the little tank together mostly stock. Well mostly stock...I started right in adding the periscope guards. Then I noticed in a photo of an M5 that there were NO periscope guards. Checking through a pile of books (see viewtopic.php?t=36288) I found only one photo that showed an M5 with a periscope guard, one much smaller and closer to the periscope than is the case with the the M4. Nonetheless, I left the periscope guards in place as they seem to make for a fine detail.

Good Morning Hr. Dr. Professor,
Yes, the periscope guards also kept me busy for a while...
I found several pictures where they can be seen and therefore installed the guards: these are all stuart in british service....
I found only one picture of american stuart with this guards About 1,650 M5A1s were delivered to the allies under Lend-Lease, mainly to Great Britain.
For its part, Great Britain equipped Polish and Czech units with the M5A1.

Hello again,
next steps vorward....

Oh, good! The periscope guards look just like the M4 ones. I see that you improved all the tools and added more tools (shovel, johnson bar, and pickaxe). I was thinking of doing the same because I saw them in photos. Last night I was enjoying adding details to this little tank because it had been so long since I had worked on a detailed static model, having been busy with electronics and figures. I noticed that for small detail parts, such as the various handles, Coolbank provided extras. Wow! That's just common sense, but so many kit makers do not do so. Of course, I will horde all the extra goodies.

Hello,
Details are now all fitted.
The electronics have been properly wired....
and then everything was painted with olive drab:

The question of the white paint on the inside of the hatches came up somewhere here on RCTW. In one of the books* I cited in the reference section, the claim (with a photo) is that some M5s came from the factory with white on the insides of the hatches and that some crews repainted them OD. So it appears that either white or OD inside the hatches is OK, unless one is replicating a specific M5 and even then can know which color was correct to that specific M5.

*If you need an exact citation, PM me and I will see if I can find it and the photo. But I will be traveling quite a bit until the second week of September. (Poor me: the same nice lady who took me to Scotland now is taking me on a Danube river cruise and next year on a Mediterranean cruise. Poor me.)

Hello Hr.Dr.Professor...
the hatches at my Stuart are olive drab - this is (I think) the closest to reality.

Today I drew the templates and let them out on the cutting plotter.
Then disappeared into the hobby room and applied the stencils and masked off the surrounding areas.
Filled the airbrush with some white paint and started spraying:


Then I painted the lashing straps: