When joining the two halves, I did not carry the cement down the sides of the hull because I wanted to be able to better align the outside surfaces. I used pair of clamps on either side of the joint backed by a steel bar to bring the sides into good alignment, Fig. 3. The final joint still has the weld bead that needs to be removed, Fig. 4.
The M4A3 Dry seems to be one of those variants that has been overlooked by the major model companies. There were over 1,600 of these tanks built by Ford. I was curious to see how easy it would be to combine two of Dragon’s newer kits into an M4A3 Dry.
The basis of this project involves splicing the front hull section from Dragon’s M4 Normandy with the rear hull from on of their M4A3 (W) kits. Cuts are made in the two hulls along the weld lines as shown in Fig. 1. The two hull halves were joined together with the aid of a pair of wooden blocks and a rubber band, Fig. 2. It is essential that something is used in the rear deck area to maintain squareness and parallelism. I cut a piece of styrene card stock, but the corresponding kit deck could be used.
Figures 5 and 6 shows the initial mock up. I am modeling a tank without the luggage rack and track stowage so the locating slots in the rear hull plate were filled and a piece of styrene was substituted on the top to eliminate the depressions for the luggage rack hinges.
The rear deck was modified to reflect the different arrangement of the filler caps and the splash guard, Fig. 7. The gap in the splash guard around the filler cap was closed along with the elimination of the weld seam, Fig. 8.
I want to thank Rob Ervin, Kurt Laughlin, Dan Reed, and Roy Chow for their responses through the Missing-Lynx allied discussion board. Rob, for his emails and time in reviewing my progress on this project; Kurt, for all his time, interest, and wealth of information and answers to about anything that I’m stumped on; Dan, for stepping in with some really great photos; Roy for the help and encouragment since I’ve been posting on the Missing-Lynx board.