Vehicle History

Being an army of a young state, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) usually don't throw anything that is still usable. The M-51 was introduced as a successor to the M-50, enabling the old Shermans to stand a chance against the T-54s, which were equipping the Egyptian and Syrian armies by the middle of the 1960s. M-51s served through the Six-day war, Attrition War, Yom Kippur and with reserve units in the '82 Lebanon war.

The M-51 was built on either a late M-4A1 cast hull or a late M-4A3 welded hull. All M-51s sport HVSS suspension, external stowage boxes attached to the hull in two known configurations, extended sponsons and cast nose. To accommodate the large 105mm gun, the T-23 turret rear was sawn off and a new counterweight extension was welded to the rear of the turret. The gun was a shortened version of that used in the (then) new AMX 30 MBT and it protrudes to approx. 3m. in front of the mantlet.

All M-51s had a diesel Cummins engine installed, producing 470hp and reducing the flammability of the older radial and multi bank engines.

Small upgrades were introduced through the years, known as Batch one through Batch four. The changes were mainly engine deck configurations (trying to improve the engine's cooling), a small stowage box on the right side of the turret, additional commander's 0.3MG and a 60mm mortar (the lessons learned in the Yom Kippur war which called for better anti-personnel defensive weapons as tank hunter teams became efficient with the introduction of RPG7s and Sagger missiles), an IR projector and finally a 'surgery' to lengthen the rear hull in a few inches, again for better cooling, on the Batch 4 vehicles (you'll have to perform some 'surgery' on the model too if you wish to make a Batch 4).

In the late 80's all remaining M-51s were sold to Chile, where they continue to serve to this day (currently being phased out and replaced by "newer" obsolete tanks).

The Kit

I bought the kit together with the Eduard PE set at the Jordi Rubio shop in Barcelona while on vacation. The kit consists of 5 sprues in pale green styrene individually wrapped in plastic bags, a mesh screen and two rubber band T80 tracks.

Also thrown in are the two sprues from Academy's Tank Supplies Set (kit no. 1382) containing the .50 cal., stowage, on-vehicle tools, tripod and bipod and ammo cans. Also featured on these two sprues are US Jerrycans and assorted main gun ammunition for the spares box. There are three figures included (one full, one 3/4 and one half figure). The figures are wearing two piece fire resistant uniform (could be regular cotton dress as well) and US WWII style tanker helmets.

You have the option to choose between two types of sprockets, two types of rear hull bustles and an optional exhaust pipe (the later two are needed if one wishes to depict a Batch 1 or 2).

Molding quality is superb with crisp detail overall and not even a hint of flash. The Horizontal Volute Spring Suspension is very detailed and captures the busy appearance of the real thing down to the casting numbers on the suspension units. Each individual suspension unit is made of 8 parts (including boogies). the Loader's pistol port is a seperate piece and is portrayed closed. the fit to the turret is medicore and calls out for some putty work in order to fare it well with the turret side. Israeli AFVs carry lots of external stowage and the M-51 is no exception, you get 6 jerrycans with holders to mount on the hull. the holders are molded on the jerrycans. not my cup of tea, you have to sand them off if you want to use PE holders instead.

The only real shortcoming of this kit appear when you start inspecting the turret, upper hull and cast nose piece. The folks at Academy overdid the texture and if brought up to 1/1 scale you'll have notches so deep they can qualify as deflected sabot hits. Even when compared to the overdone textures on Tamiya's early M4 the Academy texture stands out as an unrealistic horde of what seems like repeated scores with a hobby knife. I had to sand it and use filler and CA to get rid of the deeper dimples on the turret roof and hull front (the two places where the texture is most exaggerated).

Another place where Academy made a goofy designing flaw is the front fenders. For some reason the fenders 'float' and don’t meet with the edge of the nose as in the real thing. This problem appears on the photos of the completed model on the box and it is easy to repair with some sprue scraps and liquid cement. Academy repeated the same design flaw in their new M4A2 even though the two kits don’t share the same upper hull.

The turret roof also has a small strip with the 60mm mortar base but the mortar itself is missing. So if you want to model a Batch 3 or 4 vehicle you have to come up with an adequate mortar. I guess it's because Academy didn’t look at real war footage but rather decided to model the M-51 residing at the Latrun Armor Museum which lacks the mortar.

Finally if built OOTB as per instructions you'll get a Batch 3 vehicle. I would recommend collecting as much reference as possible in order to correctly model a tank from a specific period.

Final Verdict:

I can't comment on how it stands up against the DML kit as I haven't built the Dragon offering but as it is I highly recommend this kit, detail is good and it looks like an M-51 at the end (I don’t measure my models against scale plans, I'm not that crazy yet). I bought the Eduard PE set and it really adds finesse to the model, I would recommend it too even if you don't suffer from AMS.

The only problem with the kit is again the surface texture on the hull and turret and the small problem with the front fenders and these are easy to correct for the intermediate modeler and shouldn’t discourage a true Shermanholic from adding a model of the "Ultimate Sherman" to their collection.

User Contributed Notes