Building an Australian Matilda Medium Tank
- Tamiya Matilda kit #35024
- Firestorm Matilda Conversion kit #FST096

Finished model Left hand side.

INTRODUCTION - Building an Australian Matilda Medium Tank

This Tamiya kit along with the Firestorm Models conversion kit is a large departure from my normal builds which tend to be WW2 soft skinned transport vehicles especially trucks, Australian trucks to be more precise, so this is among the first tracked vehicles I have built. A lot of you reading this will have a lot more of an idea of which parts on a tank are called what names, but hey you gotta remember I normally build trucks! And that’s my excuse for any honest mistakes in this article.

HISTORY

The Australian Imperial Forces (A.I.F.) during the early half of WW2 followed Britain and the Commonwealth (especially Canada) in what vehicles, both armored and soft skinned, were purchased for use. Once the United States of America entered the fray a lot more of a variety of vehicles became available through Lend Lease and direct or in-direct purchases from the U.S.

A few Tank varieties were trialed including the Sherman to determine what mainstay tank the A.I.F. would equip with and after trialing all of them, both in Australia and New Guinea the British Matilda was chosen.

As was the case with most A.I.F. vehicles modifications from standard specifications were carried out almost from the time the vehicles were landed from the delivery ships. Virtually every Matilda in service with the A.I.F. was different in some way to all the others so you must choose not only which hull number you wish to model but also which time period.

THE KITS & WHAT YOU GET

KIT #35024 – Tamiya Matilda

This is an extremely old kit and was originally made to be motorized so the hull is about 4mm wider then what it should be if true to scale. It is still the only 1/35 scale Matilda around in plastic & for its age it is not a bad kit even with its scale differences. Only the lower hull, bogies & a few odds & sods are used from the kit in any place.

KIT #FST096 – Firestorm Matilda conversion

This is a well molded and detailed kit and includes a new turret, upper hull and a set of tracks in resin. A small PE set is also included with smaller items like tie down points on. Instructions are reasonably straight forward but you do need some modeling experience to build this kit.

What you get with the Firestorm Conversion kit.

My only suggestion with this conversion kit is that a decal set be supplied with the kit and not as a separate item from Firestorm. This kit also DOES NOT correct the over width hull problem associated with the Tamiya kit. What it does do is build up into a fairly accurate Australian Matilda.

THE BUILD

I started by reading the Firestorm instructions two or three times so that I hopefully did not make any mistakes during the build. I still managed to make a few along the way as I had forgotten about Murphy’s Law which still applies even here in Australia. I also decided at this stage to build the tank as #9 ‘Brassiere’ which was a howitzer equipped Infantry support tank which saw action in the Pacific.

Parts that were going to be used were cut from the Tamiya kits sprue’s and cleaned up by removing any mold lines, flash etc. This included the lower hull which I also modified slightly as per the Firestorm instructions. The Firestorm instruction sheet also lists the part numbers from the Tamiya kit that are needed as well as optional parts, in other words use the parts if you need them for the version you have decided to make.

I then test fitted the upper deck to the Tamiya lower hull and adjusted it until the two mated as good as they would. I had to use a thin strip of styrene to fill a fairly large gap in the front of the hull.

The front upper Hull to lower hull joint. Here I had to add a spacer and use some fine styrene rod to join
the two halves of the weld seam.

By doing this I did not have to use a lot of filler. I then assembled the kit bogies and added these to the lower hull. For the moment I have left the front Idler wheel off as this will be replaced with a new resin one which can be adjusted as you fit the tracks supplied in the conversion kit. Once this was done the two parts were glued together using Zap ‘Gap Filler’ CA glue.

The smaller PE parts were now removed from the fret and this is where I made my first mistake. As things were going so well I must have dozed off and instead of bending the PE tie down points to form a raised profile I glued them on flat using Zap CA and did not realize this until after the base coat of green was sprayed on. All the other PE parts as well as some of the Tamiya parts were CA glued to the Firestorm Turret and upper hull.

The smoke dischargers on the turret. All the photos I saw showed the cut down 303 rifle mechanism covered with
a canvas cover but I felt the detail was too good to cover up.

I decided also at this stage to leave the hatches open so that at a later date I could add the Firestorm crew set Part # FST029.

The turret showing the level of detail of the Firestorm kit

This is a set of 3 part WW2 Australian tank crew figures. This would also mean that the inside of the turret where the figures fit would have to be painted white as this was the color of the Interior of most Allied tanks during WW2.

Click here to continue reading the Australian Matilda Model Build Article - Page 2 - Build Cont.

 

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