A lidl Sherman Firefly

There it is. The beast!  

Just two sprues, some decals, instructions, tube of olde worlde glue, a paint brush and some paint. From these humble ingredients, great art shall be forged. 

Step one is wash the sprues. The plastic feels strong and the detail looks really good to me. Really crisp! 

Ready to go now! Snippers at the ready. 

All I have to do is make a box. But there's a challenge... I'm trying to wean myself off the old-style blobby glue and onto this new fangled extra-thin cement. I've heard it's great stuff altogether.. 

I'm underway with the Tamiya extra-thin but I don't feel comfortable using it. It's like I can't quite believe it works. 

And look, I used too much extra-thin. I pretty much coated the joins and it's seeped through with some minor melt damage on the other side. 

Old versus new... and some filler... don't know why that's there. 

I neglected to take a pic when I dry-fitted the top of the tub onto the bottom, but there was a considerable seam between them at the front. Didn't expect a fit issue in a 2020 tooling. 

So I took the blade to the rear line of the holding bracket and thinned it as much as I dared. 

The top fits more snugly to the bottom now. But I'm looking at the moulded rivet line and supposing that there probably shouldn't be any seam at all! 

Time for a dry fit. Yeah, that's all fitting okay - and you can see that I drilled out the holes on the gun muzzle. I was surprised that they were moulded up, to be honest. A deliberate challenge for newbies like me? 

The gun mechanism has gone together okay, but there's less movement of the barrel than I had hoped for. Maybe the extra-thin got away from me again and glued up some of the internal bits. I still haven't got the hang of how little liquid cement is needed. 

Look at that. Fitting the O-ring base (see next image) caused the turret to crack. That's not great. It's a pretty big split too. So I filled it as best I could, then sanded it back. 

This is the step that caused the turret crack. Didn't even notice at the time. 

There are lots of very fine seams. I'm not sure whether to try and fill them or not but I can't imagine these would be visible on the real thing, so I'm having a go with diluted filler and a damp Q-tip. 

There's my drilled out gun muzzle in pretty poor focus. 

I love the detail on the back of the tub, but two separate parts will cover it. So I've decided to mask the glue points and not put the rear shelf over it until as late as possible. That way I can use it as a test area for washes and weathering - I have never done either but I'm going to try them both on this build. 

Similarly, masked glue points for the join between the bottom of the tub and the top. This way I can paint the underneath bits before gluing them together... I hope! 

I still have a few very small parts to add to the main body of the tank. Machine gun, two things on the side, and an odd looking yolk on the turret. But they kind of get in the way as well as posing a breakage risk. So I'll put them on after painting. I've maskol-ed the join points. I guess I'll have to wait and see if that works. Primer on! 

Primed on a old stone table out the back during the beginnings of a gale. Despite this, it's kind of turned out alright.