Well, I’m really happy with this model—it was a lot of work, and I tried a lot of new techniques. It’s a much modified Revell T-80B kit, with most of the detail scratchbuilt from plastic stock and brass, with some Extratech and Eduard photoetch parts. The road wheels and snorkel/intake cover were modeled in a CAD program and printed on a 3d printer by a friend (Thanks, David!)
I actually started with the MG mount. Then I resectioned the chassis to lengthen it to scale and recreate the distinctive spacing of the road wheels. I reworked the turret with Milliput to add bulk to the back and match the profile in my drawings. The rear engine deck was largely replaced and the hull rear is sheet brass and photoetch. All of the light guards and the turret basket were soldered from brass wire. The barrel is the Miniarm aluminum, but It needed some reworking with a file around the bore evacuator. I’ve since discovered the Zedval barrel, which looks better against drawings scaled from Jane’s. The intake cover has a metal foil cap on top, painted to simulate canvas. The mantlet cover is also metal foil tape. There's an earlier WIP post that gives details to the above steps.
The reactive armor plates are all made individually from many, many pieces. The curtains on the front are rolled Milliput.
I’m less happy with the finish. I primed it all with Tamiya gray and gave it a base coat of Model Master Light Ghost Gray. I put on the camouflage pattern in Model Master RLM Olive Grun, which looks wrong in the bottle, but came out looking right once it dried. I mixed an offblack shade by mixing some of the base color in Tamiya Flat Black. The colors ended up looking right, but I felt as if I was fighting the paint along the way. It’s been awhile since I ‘ve handpaited camo. I thought about an airbrush, but the cost in money and time to get skilled enough for this task were too much. The green paint may have been old stock, it went on thin and showed the base coat. The off-black was the opposite—too thick and showed brush strokes, but by the end it went down okay.
After painting, I put the tracks on. They’re lousy in terms of detail. At one point I convinced myself I could make good individual track links out of plastic stock, and after an example or two, I came back to sanity. The tracks are Tamiya Semi Gloss Black, with track pads of are Tamiya dark gray.
I did some light weathering with an umber wash and drybrushing lighter shades of the base colors to make details pop out, but these tanks see little service, so I didn’t want to overdo it. Then I added some final detailing, in the form of the clear parts. The filters on the commander’s and gunner’s sights are dark blue acetate with the sights themselves hollowed out. The dark IR headlight is a punch of dark rose acetate over Tamiya’s Semigloss Black. Edmund’s scientific sells a book of hundred of shades that’s quite cheap.
There are no decals. I may add a number at some point.
For all of the glass parts—periscopes and such—I used…glass! I found that microscope cover slides, which are thin glass, cut very consistently using a carbide scriber and a straight edge. It was possible to make thin strips that could be broken with minipliers into small rectangles to fill in the periscopes. I used various glues, mostly epoxy. I think this would give great results in a larger scale and could be used for sights by putting color filters behind.
Finally, the commander is a MIG figure, the driver is from Armory. I’m not a great figure painter, it’s just the basics.
My next project is kitbashing a T-90 from the ACE turret and a Revell T-72 hull. I plan to use some of the techniques from this kit such as building the reactive armor, but I don’t want to spend as much time on it as I did on this. Maybe I’ll try airbrushing the cam pattern on that one.
I’m proud to have a unique model, although I think I could probably almost build another from all the scratchbuilt details I’ve lost on the floor of my workshop. It got to t the point that I didn’t worry when I dropped something—I knew that if I didn’t find it, I’d stumble across something I’d dropped earlier!