Modeller Build Logs

M4A3E8 Thunderbolt VII Kit

It’s high time I put away the Panthers I’ve been working on and start on something completely different. One of the first models I ever built was a DML M4A3E8 Korean War. That model was destroyed in a paint stripping accident a long time ago. I was very excited when DML came out with there Thunderbolt VII kit. I’ve had a copy in the stash for I guess a year and now is as good a time to build her as any. I’ll be building her mostly out of the box but I won’t be doing an out of the box vehicle. There are so many vehicles you can build from this kit I just don’t know how to behave. My initial goal with the kit was to build an M4A3E8 without any add-on armor, split hatch, single pin tracks, mantlet W/O dust cover clips, and muzzle break. That’s been a tough combination for me to come up with given my limited Sherman library. The best I’ve been able to come up with in the above combination is a vehicle with add-on hull armor as seen in the attached picture. It is an interesting vehicle in that it has the add-on armor, an additional 30 cal MG mounted on the turret roof and a 50 cal coax MG but these features are very late war indeed; as such, I may hold off on it for a second go at this kit. I may end up building an oval hatch vehicle simply because I at least have good pictures of them without the add-on armor. We’ll just cross that bridge when we get to it.