Ok guys, here is a sneak peak. My Grey Desert MERDC Abrams and my buddies Verdant MERDC Abrams. I painted both but he drew the lines on his from a photo other than the one I sent him so the pattern varies a little bit from my tank but that basically the color scheme my m60a3 will look like.
As for the drive shafts. I completed the shaft extensions of 7mm per side. I installed them and then decided they were too long. More eyeballing and laying rulers down etc etc and I decided to hack 1mm off the length of each side off. I re installed the sprockets and tracks and eyeballed and straight edged it over and over and I think they are dead on now.
So the solution was to extend the shaft length by 6mm. That makes the overall shaft from 58mm to 64mm. Just and an FYI for another measurement, my shaft length protruding from the hull is 20mm.
Now here is the kicker. I was cleaning up and I picked up the one plastic HL tan sprocket that I used to help adjust and eyeball measurements and put it back in the HL accessory bag that they included in my kit, (I used metal sprockets) The bag contains the sprockets, HL size sprocket screws, spare plastic track links, and....... two white plastic thingies. I noticed them and pondered their importance. I pulled one out and it was delrin or something similar, and its D shaped, like the axle shaft. I measured it and it is 4.5mm long. It hit me that DKLM included this as a spacer to go inside the sprocket to push it far enough out from the tank to run. The bad thing about doing the spacing this way, one its only 4.5mm and I believe it takes 6mm additional to get a correct alignment, and the other is you take up all the space in the sprocket and are left with very little to hold onto the shaft with. If the track binds or throws your likely to twist that plastic sprocket right off the shaft mounting tube. Any way so there is that mystery solved.
Below you will see the picture of my chassis completed. You can see the drive shafts and that bugs me, real m60s the sprocket is close up to the end of the out drive. So I am thinking about using maybe a HL body bearing like the after market ones for the abrams or T90. that would fill it up a little bit. I'll deal with that later. At least it will run and track correctly now.
On to the upper hull. I have like 8 coats of building primer on the hull and you can still see the faint 3d texture so I decided I had to sand the primer with 400. Ive done the front and the close side in the forground. The lighter areas are sanded. getting around all the handles and bolts and **** is a major pain in the ass worth of time. Im going to sand the upper engine deck too, but it is a bit flexible and the weakest part of the tank. I cracked the rear left corner of it and had to super glue it. That deck is very thin as opposed to the other areas of the tank. So just like how I have braced all my custom Sherman build hulls, I am going to scuff it deep with an exacto all over and then smear bondo into it and then lay in a piece of plexi that I will cut to size to make it super strong. I like beefy tough tanks for when I pick them up so they don't break.
So that's it for now folks. Just a lot more sanding for a while and waiting for hopefully a care package from Carson of all the screws I am missing for all over the turret.
