Small Scale Military Headquarters

So I am fooling around with my 1/32 Shermans and Grant's and the new FOV Lee, and I pull out the 21st Century Priest and cannot help but notice the width difference between the Lee/Grant and the Priest. Now I am not real bright, but it was my understanding that the Priest came from ( at least intitially) the M3 chassis. So I start to wonder... Is this a mistake? Should they be the same width? I start fooliing around on some reference sites, and come across a picture of the Priest looking somewhat different than the 21st C model, at least in the front. In the picture the machine carries the same two vertical weld lines between the tracks as are present on the Grant/Lee. However, the 21st model Priest carries no such lines.
So, all you experts out there....
Is the 21st Century Priest too wide proportionally, or is the FOV Lee/Grant too narrow, or are both correct? Did they widen the chassis and body to create the Priest? And what of the two vertical weld lines? Were they present on early Priests but not present later when production switched from a Lee/Grant based frame to a Sherman frame? Did 21st C get lazy and simply omit the weld lines, or is this model a later version?
Who is up for answering this poor fools questions?

I'll give it a shot but I can't claim fact.....

The Priest was (about) 2.87 Meters wide, which is 287 centimeters (duh ) 1/32 of that is about 8.97. So just measure your to tank and see how close that is. Note: you will find that the same tank at the same scale made by diff companies will sometimes be different.

The Lee's width was about 2.72...so the Priest was a bit wider. I wouldn't expect a company to modify a mold to show this. With that kind of change (Lee->Preist) I imagine they would need a new mold anyway so I'm not sure......

As far as the vertical lines go.... There were several companies making M3s (and then M4s) and with that several ways of making them. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong here) the factories that made train cars had the ability to make the chassis whole....so no lines. While the car companies had to make the chassis in three parts and put them togeather...hence the lines. This is all off the top of my head so I'm not 100% sure.

Yes...the M7 (and M3) came in both versions...that I know as I have pictures of both. However judging by those pictures the lines were more common not.

-H

edit: corrected something.....must stop drinking before posting..

Thanks!
I have subsequently noted the presence of the weld lines and the absence of them in several pictures of the Priest. Your explanation makes a lot of sense. I also noted that the priest width in the model fairly matches the width of the 21 C Sherman, though not the FOV Lee. I had just wondered if the actual width of Lee's and Shermans was that different, or whether this was simply two companies working differently.
Thanks for the reply!

No prob. Happy to help.

I would guess that they had to make it a little wider to acomodate the 105 gun, ammo, space for crew, and gun sight. It couldn't have been that hard to make it wider from a manufacturing stand point. Good eye to you though for noticing.

Take care.

-H

The area between the tracks is the transmision cover. There are three types of covers. The one with the lines is refered to as the three piece housing and is actually bolted together. It was used on the standard M3 series and early Priest and early Shermans. It was replaced in production by the 1st cast version which resembled in basic shape, the bolted version. It was used on some Priest and mid production Shermans. The 2nd cast version produced had more of a chin or sharp over hang. It was used on later Priest based on the Ford M4A3 Sherman chassis and other later Shermans such as the Easy Eight(M4A3E8). All three covers could be used on any M3 or M4 based chassis. However , in practice the later versions were used to replace the older. In other words, you wouldn't see a Easy Eight with a bolted cover but you might see an early production Sherman witha late production cover. Width should be the same on the Priest, M3 and M4.

Very good. More info. Great!
The FOV Sherman is 3 1/4 inches wide, as is the 21st century Sherman and Priest. However, the new FOV Lee, and the previously released Grant are 2 3/4 inches wide. Should they not, if this info is correct, all be the same? Why would FOV make the Lee more narrow than their own Sherman? These mysteries will drive me to drink!

It has more too do with errors in developing the model then the real subjects. I have seen it happen many times in plastic models and diecast cars. Somebody make a miscalculations and the end result is an error in the model.

What we have here is a demonstration of sloppy modeling. The difference between our "toy" market and "real models" is that we get "close is good enough". Most of our 1/32nd tanks came from 1/35th model kits including any mistakes that the original kit had. The pantograph them up about 10% more and make it suitable for mass diecasting. The 21C M7 is a direct copy of the Italeri M7 kit from the late 1970s. The size difference is just due to sloppiness of the mold cutters. Look at the high-end collectibles like King and Country, every one of his Shermans has slight differences in size.

On the real vehicle, there wasn't much variation in the basic chassis - that allowed them to use common parts like transmission covers, floor plates and other items that were already laid out for medium tank production.

On the real M7 there were at least THREE production batches with minor details between them. The Italeri and 21C version represent 1944 production "Priests" pretty well. I have crawled over two real ones in parks in Kansas that have all these same features. The early production (like at Alamein) had the three-piece transmission cover, a shallower MG "pulpit", M3-style suspension bogies and no folding side armor for the ammo racks. These make quite a difference in appearance. I have started cutting up a 21C Priest to make an early version (#$%^ diecast metal!!!) and it looks different from its brother.

Gary

Wasn't the Sextant(25lb SPG) based on the Canadian Ram Med. Tank
not a Priest, but close in appearance.

Panzer_M wrote:Wasn't the Sextant(25lb SPG) based on the Canadian Ram Med. Tank
not a Priest, but close in appearance.

Yes you are correct.

Commenwealth forces also re-armed M7's with their 25lb'r guns too.

And some M7s were stripped of guns and used as ad-hoc APCs.

And as for size diffs between similar chassied vehicles; this is the bane of scale modelers for ages. The Tamiya T34 1/35 chassis is quite different than the Dragon/DML 1/35th T34 as one of many examples. As others have stated, different companies interpreted dimensions a bit differently.