It is much appreciated, as I remembered the cut and pull "Garfield" method, but not the details of your "lift and build-up" alternative.
My Jagdtiger experience makes me find modifying flat plates much more difficult and unforgiving than puttying rounded shapes. This is compounded by any putty join filling of the plate edges which generally makes it difficult to judge the symmetry and angles of the plates... In order to not soften adjacent kit details, I cannot prime the whole thing very often to get a better "vision", so to me flat plates are a very difficult and unforgiving contruction to duplicate, especially when combined with normal kit parts, where care must be taken to not soften or fill the included detail with repeated priming...
With the above in mind, it seems to me that the accurate rear deck of the Hobby Boss M4A1 76mm, and the rounded nature of the shapes to correct, make it by far the easiest of the Hobby Boss Shermans to build to a high standard of accuracy.
On the other hand, the combining of a Hobby boss A3 front end with a Tamiya M4 rear seems like a novel and effective way of getting an accurate Sherman, especially if the taller HB transmission cover is used... On the Tamiya rear hull, the diagonal lateral upper side join does not reach far forward enough (as we established with Tim), but falls short by only about 2mm, so it can be discreetly scraped and sanded to reach a bit further forward without a major rebuilding of the whole surface (I did do this successfully on the Azimuth composite hull).
The HB mantlet I find doable but pretty bad as, in addition to its frontal appearance, its thickness cross-section is badly off, as seen in this PMMS review photo;
Thanks by the way for pointing out the available 76 mm AM barrels!
Overall I think the HB M4A1 76 mm is far from being in the same hard-to-fix category as the other HB Shermans, and the M4A3 offers apparently an easy kitbash. This is, it seems to me, already much more accuracy potential than can be wrung out of a Tamiya Jagpanther, Hetzer or King Tiger...
Gaston
P.S. Konrad, There is only one lonely photo of your very nice HB M4A1 76mm "early" in the Track 48 gallery, which is too bad as it is one of the few HB Shermans there. It would be nice to see some square angle photos of it to see how good this kit can be...
Can't wait to see those kitbashed Shermans finished Wayne!
![[linked image]](http://www.perthmilitarymodelling.com/reviews/48/hobbyboss/images/hb84801d18.jpg)