Ugh, still the uploader is reorienting my pictures to its own desires..... Well, this shows the area of the clark recoil I had to remove to allow it to clear the Tamiya TBU base installed in the commanders hatch. All seems to work good now. On to other things.
Now this is something that has really bothered me. Look at the orientation of the machine gunners port and the .30cal gun shield. How it is right above the differential cover.
The M4a4 Firefly kit hull has it much higher up. Not just because to make it fit on the Tamiya hull I had to add a strip of plastic across the bottom of the front glacis. The Henglong Sherman has weird metrics on thefront with its obtuse differential cover and out of dimension glacis to mate to it. Always have issues when I adapt HL front parts....
So onward I trudged deciding I could not live with the MG port so high. I decided to cut it out and make my own.
So here I where I stopped for tonight. It was time to go in with the family but after a coupler hour work I have the basic structure and shape in place. Some more putty, rounding and smoothing out of the overall component is needed but I think it will come out looking very well. I have a Tamiya MG appliance sitting in place to show off the appearance.
Unfortunately what this means is that the applique armor plates supplied with the kit will not fit over my fabbed up MG port so I will make a new ones, though I suspect that will be quite easy.