I picked up a Tasca Firefly when it first came out, but I was
stumped for schemes or subjects. While at AMPS 07, I wandered past
Sid Arnold's Armoured Brigade Models table where he had some Firefly
upgrades. What really caught my eye was the new Jakrei figures
scuplted by Pete Morton that Rick Minichiello had on sale at Sid's
table. I had earlier done a couple of Dartmoor figures that Pete had
sculpted, so I quickly bought a bunch of the Jakrei figures. The
obvious ones for the Firefly were a pair of figures in Pixie suits
loading ammo.
With the Jakrei figures in hand,
and Sid's upgraded turret, I then wandered the hall looking for
other options. Bill Miley from CMD had the excellent Armourscale 17
pdr. ammo set in brass, so I was on my way. What I needed were some
17 pdr. ammo boxes, but I couldn't find those at the show. Rick
mentioned at Accurate Armour had done both the metal transport cases
and the wooden boxes, so on returning home, off went an order to AA.
The basic Tasca Firefly kit is lovely, and I won't bore the readers
with the details here. The Firefly itself was done out of the box
with the obvious exception of Sid's turret. I view of the excellent
quality of the Tasca turret, is the ABM upgrade necessary? No, but
Sid has done a lovely job on a lot of the fine points, and it saves
an awful lot of time with issues like turret texture, casting
numbers and other fine detail. I'd rather work on other details than
on these, so the ABM turret came in handy.
Since I wanted to do the tank with figures in Pixie suits, this
meant depicting a Firefly in autumn of 1944 or later. Most of the
shots of the British Fieflies I had in various references showed
them with extended end-connectors, and I wasn't in the mood to do
another set of those. Rummaging through my photos, I found some
shots of Polish Fireflies in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944,
minus the EEC. So that was my subject. The only problem was that the
Polish ones seemed to have some sort of ammo boxes welded to the
bustle box. Fortunately, one of the photos was clear enough to show
25 pdr markings . So a web search of Barry Beldam's helpful material
turned up a scale plan of the P59 steel ammo box. Having recently
bought a Proxon milling machine (thanks Al!) my first task was to
machine a box out of leftover resin sprue gates, then cast up a
bunch.
The Polish Fireflies were covered with spare tracks (Canadian style)
and I remembered that I had bought a set of Model Kasten track when
they first came out. While beautifully molded, they are a curse to
assemble. With all the ingredients in place, I put the Firefly
together along with the sundry ammo bits. For other stowage, I used
a few bits of the Legend Firefly stowage set.
Once assembly and painting were done, I added the Evergreen foliage
that the Polish Fireflies carried. I made this from some dried
floral material I found at the Michaels craft store in my area, plus
some other evergreen stuff I had picked up at a model train show.
Overall, this was a fun project, but with all the accesories, this
was easily in the $250 range. Oh well, I still have a stack of
leftovers for future projects!
