Was wondering if anyone has used balsa to build turrets for tanks rather than trying to make all the curves on a lot of turrets by bending plastic.Was looking at how hard it would be to get the shapes of a few of the turrets trying to use plastic,and it would be fairly easy to do it in balsa.With the proper finish I would think it would look just like plastic,and you could still mount the gun and other interior gear in it. BIGMIG

Balsa seems like it would be way to soft to hold up for vey long. You could shape a balsa turret, then use it as a master to make a mold to cast the final out of resin.

or laminate the crap out of it with epoxy or something

I have seen rc crawlers made with balsa wood cabs and decks etc. nothing as complex as the angles on a tank though ..

You could carve a master plug from balsawood then seal it with thin cyano, or use basswood for the plug, then vacuform sheet styrene over it. I have built several vacu-formers of different sizes. I made one small one for doing small items from an old small electric hot plate some masonite for the vacu chamber and use a vacume cleaner to creat the vacume for drawing the softened styrene down over the plug. I will dig it out and take some pics of the vacuformer. For larger vacu-formers I have made the chamber out of old speaker cabinets and use the oven on broil to soften the styrene then with the styrene softened i just turn on the vacume cleaner then remove from the oven

Good old Bondo is another way to go. Its used all the time in the special effects industry for movie models. Make a wooden shape smaller than you need. Coat it in a layer of Bondo and sand to shape. Seal it with epoxy resin or even cryo as mentioned above.

The problem with bondo or glass cloth and resin is the shrinkage when it cures. You need to make the "plug" about 5 to 10% larger to account for the shrinkage. Epoxy and glass cloth the shrinkage is alot less. You also need to "wax" or apply a form of mold release like pardol otherwise you won't be able to get the molded item off the mold or plug. I ususally use either paste wax for hardwood floors or paste wax for cars. I apply a good amount rubbing it onto the mold then apply a good thick layer and hit it with a blow dryer set on high to smooth it out let it cool then apply what ever material you are useing.
I used to work for a wildlife sculpture studio my job there was the mold maker and I also poured the items. We used a product called WEP(water extendable polyester resin)

On the Panzerketten forum a fella made a balsa M-47 turret, it had a functioning barrel elevation unit and recoil I think too.