1:35 Churchill - 3D-Printed Exhausts (for AFV Club and Tamiya Kits)

The infantry tank that carried itself on its armor

The Churchill came about as an infantry tank covering the advance of the soldiers, and its construction matched that: exceptionally thick armor, eleven small road wheels on each side and tracks running around the whole outline of the hull. Speed was set aside, but the machine managed terrain in which faster cruiser tanks got stuck. It was first committed in larger numbers at Dieppe in 1942, later fought in Tunisia, on the Italian peninsula and in northwestern Europe, and became the basis for flamethrower and engineer conversions.

The weakness of the casting that this set addresses

The exhaust pipe comes out at the rear of the hull and is clearly visible both from behind and from above. Injection molded parts have the mouths blanked off, because a mold cannot get into a cavity, and the modeler has to drill them out laboriously. The replacement comes with the opening already there and with the structure of the welds and clamping bands, which on plastic merge with the parting line.

How to handle it

Cut the original sprue gates off with a saw and level the area so that the new part seats without a gap. Super glue or thin resin is suitable, as ordinary plastic cement does not hold here. It pays to treat the surface first with a base coat in a rust shade and only then to lay dry shadows of soot and burnt metal onto it.

The Churchill saw a whole family of derivatives, from the flamethrower version with a towed reservoir of fuel to the engineer vehicle with a short mortar for demolishing fortifications. The exhaust stayed in the same place on all of them, so the replacement will serve regardless of which variant you are building. On the real machines that part was permanently sooted and discolored by heat, which makes it a rewarding target for shading.