Warlord’s Bolt Action M4 Sherman Medium Tank – From Unboxing To Painting

As I get the nippers going the M4 quickly starts taking shape. The tracks are a little fiddly to line up but nothing drastic. The chassis goes together nicely and before long I am onto the smaller components that sit atop it. That’s the lights, armour plates, spange-buckets, armoured war-gazebo, and greater crested spice gibbon. I am going to level with you. I know a bit about tanks but I don’t know a lot about tanks. I am half-remembering/completely making up some of this but you get the jist. Lot’s of hooks and loops and bits of metal that add visual detail to drybrush later on. Make sure you use tweezers when applying these. If you are a stubborn dumb dumb like me who prefers to use his sausage fingers instead then prepare to elongate the build process by 20-30% and be absolutely miserable about it. Also, pro tip, when assembling any model kit it is highly recommended not to do so in a room with a grey carpet.

It’s also around now I notice a minor issue with the instructions. The black and white images show the current stage of the build as well as which components to add next. What it doesn’t show you is exactly where to add them, instead opting to have the components floating somewhere adjacent to roughly where to glue the piece, as if to say “see this hoop thing? This belongs on the tank” why thank you Warlord. Often it’s made obvious by a nearby hole that fits the piece perfectly but if you struggle then try looking ahead a few steps to see where the piece is sitting on future diagrams. Again, not a major issue made merciful by the limited number of overall pieces in the kit and far more problematic on bigger kits.

When you get to turret town you have the option of not using glue to allow you to turn that cannon in a 360 arc, and to remove the turret. Useful for those who want to paint it separately or like to signify a tank has gone bye bye during a game by removing the turret. I am in that small camp of people who likes to glue theirs on to keep everything secure and sturdy. It is atop the turret however that I encountered great sadness. Piece no. 32 is a small searchlight mounted by the turret. It goes in without issue and then 30 seconds later I put my thumb on it and snapped it. Huh. I won’t fault the kit for this because at that scale the searchlight is going to be delicate, and my right thumb is notoriously unwieldy. I filed and smoothed out the remaining stump and I simply include my failure as a cautionary tale. Speaking of bespoke modifications, I snip and file the ariel right down simply as this will allow easy storage via my preferred method - 4 litre really useful boxes. With the ariel intact I wouldn’t be able to close the lid. If anyone asks it got shot off by another tank.

Build rounding off I mount this bad boy on a rectangular base that comes in around 100X50mm. Heresy to some - convenient to magnetise for others. 1 hot glue gun and some iddy biddy mini magnets later and she is ready for painting.

I blast the Sherman with Vallejo Olive Drab primer for a no fuss (that means lazy) undercoat. Next the tracks get a couple thin coats of AK Rubber Black. Then I portion up some Smokey Ink, Beastly Brown, and Dark Aluminium Vallejo colours onto a palette and cut up a sponge from an old mini booster pack. Using tweezers I lightly dab the colours over the tank to represent chips and mud splatter. This is a great technique when you don’t actually know what you are doing. In mere minutes it’s starting to look sort of like a very small, but almost real, tank. I tie everything together with a sepia wash, slap on a premade basing mix and bring it full circle by rimming the base with Olive Drab. There - just enough effort to call it done. I’m a happy lad.