M7 Priest, US 2nd Armored Division, Sicily, July 1943

Starting my first open-top AFV. I’m going to go straight out of the box on this one for the most part. 

Driver’s compartment and suspension done. So far the kit builds up nicely. This is also my first Academy kit. 

So I guess it’s tough for a manufacturer to hide the injector pin marks on kits with interiors. Looks like I’ve got 28 of them on the interior hull. 

The 105 is done 

So the side mounted dash looked really questionable to me in terms of accuracy. Almost looks like it was put there as an afterthought. Also, I read an online build by an author who was an excellent modeler and appeared very knowledeable, who replaced this Academy dash with a front mounted dash from an M3 Lee kit. The author declared that the Academy kit dash was inaccurate, and he had not seen such a dash mount anywhere. 

The author continued to say that the additional seat to the side of the driver also fails to appear in any research. That dash was really bothering me so In spite of my earlier commitment to stay out-of-box, I decided to do a little research. 

Well there it is in a museum piece! 

And there it is again in a period photo! My apologies to Academy! On the other hand that additional seat to the left of the driver makes no sense and does not appear in any of the photos I’ve seen, so Im leaving it out 

There’s the main components. 

And here’s the dry fit 

The upper body requires a bit of muscle to squeeze forward flush into the lower hull. It will probably require some clamping along with the pushing, which would be terrifying if J were using a lot of finely detailed aftermarket PE… 

But overall it’s been a nice build.