Turret done (for now)

My friends, I got the turret all welded up including most of the details. I'm keeping the hatches for later when it's time to assemble the figures, and the remaining stuff is just photoetch. Some details look better in plastic though, so I used these from the box. I also ordered a resin 50 cal Browning because surprisingly, the Voyager set comes without it. I find this pretty strange considering the M103 Voyager set has a resin MG. 

Speaking of machine guns, there are two coax 50 cals in the mantlet. I only had one barrel from RB Model so I "borrowed" the other one from the aforementioned M103 set. However they have slightly different dimensions but I was able to find an Aber set of barrels for the M6 Heavy tank which comes with twin 50 cals, so I'll replace them when the parcel arrives. 

There's no aftermarket main gun barrel, which sucks big time as the barrel has a threaded portion on the muzzle. I did my best and I think the result is okay enough. The two barrel halves had to be aligned perfectly, clamped with laundry pegs and only then I applied liquid cement. When it was all dry I used a razor saw to re-scribe the thread in order to make it deeper and get rid of the seam line in the recessed parts, and then carefully sanded the whole barrel with a sanding sponge. Then a quick coat of primer to check for any imperfections. 

If you glue the gun to the mantlet as it's intended in the kit, it'll sit awkwardly on "top" of it. Thus I had to scribe a circle around the gun and shave some plastic away to make a circular indentation so the gun will sit "inside" the mantlet.

The roof of the turret is welded from several sections and the large rangefinder block was a welded casting too. Most of the welds were ground away in the factory so they're barely noticeable, but when you look close enough at the real thing, they're clearly there. Of course I wanted them to be visible so I purposely made them more obvious 😁

L profile beams on the back are made from Evergreen profiles. The MG barrel mounts will be made from photoetch, and I just found it easier to make the beams from scratch rather than cleaning up the kit parts. 

Other than that it was the standard procedure... remove a detail from the sprue, clean it up, glue to the model, add a weld around it. 

Now I'll focus either on the running gear and tracks or the front cast section of the hull!