Sherman Flail

After fixing the Roco Sherman rear deck to make it into an M4A3 Sherman it was time to add more details.

This is my patchwork Sherman.  It's made of plastic and resin, and Roco and Heiser and resin cast parts and other bits.

Decades ago I purchased a used collection and it included two flail Sherman tanks.  The flail was a device that had a mechanical drum that would turn and chains attached to the drum would fly around the drum and beat the ground.  The idea is that the chains would explode landmines and not damage the tank.  Thus cleared there would be an obvious path through the landmine.

The boom portion of the Sherman flail models were not very good and so I saved the very clever drums and rebuilt the booms so they would be sturdier and more accurate.

I also made a flail tank on my own before buying this two.  I used actual chain on my flail drum.  The booms on my flail tank were sturdier than the one's I purchased but were even less accurate than the purchased ones.

So I made three new booms and installed both my boom and the two purchased flails to three different Sherman tanks.

While this version of the flail is not accurate in detail, it looks a lot more like the real flail than the ones I started with.  It is also a very durable model.