The past few evenings I have spent finalizing the details on the Pershing, the usual finish of the construction phase, number of small details to be added, checking and cleaning molding seams, filling gaps – and there’s quite few, though mostly small ones on this model. For the filling of the gaps I use Mr. Surfacer or Tamiya putty mixed with Tamiya super thin cement.It jsut needs a bit of sanding afterwards, but is good in filling small gaps and seams.

As can be seen from the pictures, I have decided to replace all the barrels in the kit. The main gun barrel got replaced with the RB aluminium one, the detail is incomparably better and the price is acceptable. The only tricky part is that the barrel comes without any instructions whatsoever, so you have to figure out how the parts go together. There is not many option however, so it’s not as difficult as it may seem.

The 30 cal machine gun at co-drivers position was replaced with resin one from the Verlinden 30-cal machine gun resin set and again, the detail is much better than the on the plastic one. The Verlinden set is not the top class in today’s standards but is quite decent and gives you full 4 sets of machine guns with 2 barrels for each one of them – I guess they count with some damage during the assembly – quite smart, I must admit…

50 cal barrel was replaced with the one from Voyager’s set. This is really top class, the barrel and the sleeve (or whatever is that part at the root of the barrel called) are very finally made from brass, there is small photoetch sheet provided with replacement parts for sights and rear handles (I haven’t used these).

So now I will have to mask off the running gear and tracks and start priming…

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