Flames of War 15mm M4A3 (105mm) Sherman
By Don Joy
Flames of War is a wargaming rules set for World War II ground battles. The company issues a rather extensive range of WWII armor, softskins, and artillery in 15mm (1/122nd) scale. Though I have decided I am not going to the expense of wargaming in yet another scale, the miniatures did catch my attention since I’m going thru a great scale down-shift. I picked up a couple to build for the heck of it and thought I’d share my opinion.
The kits are simple and come in both blister packs and “platoon” packs. The platoons are usually 2 vehicles plus command vehicles. Since I’m not planning to game with these, I picked up the single kits. These run for about $11 each, depending on your supplier. The M4A3 (105mm) was actually an accident – I grabbed a Sherman off the rack and didn’t pay too close attention until I had it out of the package.
The kits are simple: resin cast hull and turrets; injection molded sprue with tracks, guns and hatches, white metal bits. The injection sprue is standard for Sherman and variants and has VVSS instead of HVSS.
The castings are clean with no bubbles. Turrets appear molded into the hull but are actually “glued” in using clear silicone. If you want to move the turret, you need to carefully pry the turret loose. Use something blunt. Their resin is hard, but you don’t want to damage the pieces. Also, leave the silicone in place inside the “turret well”. Otherwise there is considerable play in turret when it is set back in.
I cleaned up the bottom of the hull, and painted it overall OD. I painted the tools molded on the hull with a brush: steel heads and brown handles. (Yes, I know they would probably be OD painted handles, but I like using brown to add a bit of contrast) For the turret, I cleaned a molding line on the white metal gun barrel and attached it using super glue. Hatches were attached with white glue because I plan to open the commander’s hatch and add the white metal figure later. Tracks were removed, a few seam lines cleaned up, and they also received the OD treatment. Tracks were painted steel. I painted the road wheels black, but won’t bother with that on future models because it is not visible in the final product anyway.
I am experimenting with using a waterbased black paint to pick out the detail on small kits, and I applied that technique here. All parts were painted, then scrubbed with water and a paper towel to remove the excess. This works OK on the resin parts, not so well on the metal barrel. This has the overall effect of darkening the paint, while staying in the recesses. I will try lightening my OD on a future attempt to see how the final product appears. For the tracks, I also added a coat of a translucent, waterbased brown to try to simulate rust. Once dry, I used a paper towel to rub off the high spots and leave the brown in the crevices.
I assembled the model (all 4 pieces…) and added markings. The decal sheets are sold separately (this is a wargaming company, after all…) and the sheets come with markings for a dozen or more vehicles. The decals are thin and tolerate Solvaset well. Another option would be to add the decals before the weathering – something else I will have to try in the future. I used stretched sprue for the antenna, but will remove the one in the photo and add a thinner one when I get the commander painted. I also used a very thin piece of stretched sprue for the bow machine gun. The kit’s .50cal was painted and added to the back of the commander’s cupola.
I sprayed some brown “weathering” along the tracks on the bottom of the hull. I also over sprayed the top with the brown, but very lightly.
Final Verdict: I think it’s a nice little kit. It’s sufficiently accurate that our resident Sherman expert correctly identified the type when I couldn’t. The armor guys think the .50 call is too large – probably a result of being a wargaming miniature. They sometimes tend to accentuate features. The 15mm scale doesn’t match our standard modeling scales: 1/122nd compared to 1/144th is 18% too large. While that doesn’t sound like too much, it gets to be quite a bit when you add it to all three dimensions – 164% increase in volume. You can see the comparison photo to an old 1/72nd Grant I had lying about and the 1/44th Sherman in the Pegasus “War of the Worlds” kit.
But the kits are an easy build, represent the subjects well, and have an increasing line to choose from. For instance, Flames of War are issue M6 heavy and T14 Assault tanks this summer. To my knowledge, no one has ever offered those in any scale. Their selection of British, German, Russian, Italian, Finish, Czech, and Hungarian tanks is equally interesting and growing. So I’ll be throwing one out here every now and then as I continue to build them.