The A 13 Cruiser tank was a late 1930s improvement of the previous A 9 and A 10 cruiser tanks. The British went with the Christie suspension, and went with the concept of speed to compensate for relatively light armour. The A 13 served in the May 1940 campaign in France and later in the Western Desert. It led directly to the A 15 “Crusader” tank.
I started with Tiger Ace’s .stl and
- upsized it to 1/56th scale (it is larger than one would think; just a few inches shorter than the late war Cromwell tank)
- sliced the tracks off, so that they can print on their side, flat to the built plate.
- I added track teeth to the tracks.
- I added assembly notches to the hull and recesses in the tracks to ensure proper alignment of the tracks and hull
- I thickened the main gun and coaxial MG for better printing
- I created a separate turret mounting piece for the turret, which again aids in FDM printing.
- filled in open spaces (behind vent grill, exhaust, etc.) which potentially become messy with support material; I fill them so they are cleaner (again, in SLA it would be fine but I work in FDM)
As always, print at 0.1mm layers, with supports. Clean the support material away carefully and test fit before gluing.
Thanks to Tiger Ace for all his work, which made this print possible.
vadersson –
This is a great model. I printed it on a Creality CR-6SE with PLA using the minis profile from Fat Dragon Games. All parts came out very clean and the supports were easily removed. I recommend some filing or sand paper on the rough spots where the supports attached if they are very visible (like under the gun barrels.) The files printed in 4 easy files and took maybe 24 hours total.