rubber/vinal/plastic tracks?

I’ve heard of it from rubber tires on various brands. Just not of vinyl tracks. I have an early release Trumpeter T-55 (with the bad styrene impervious to most model cements) with stiff vinyl tracks that’s approaching 20 years old now, and no issues with those tracks

After readig some reviews I see they also do not say anything about the tracs reacting, so maybe as stated it is mostly the Trumpeter kits of a certain era.

I am rather keen to try some weathering tecniques on the net with this build

That Academy kit you have should give you no problems with reactions between the plastic road wheels and the vinyl tracks.

Thanx for the feedback :-)

Theuns

If you have metal foil often used by car modelers to add chrome, you can also line the inner wheel rim with the chrome foil to act as an additional barrier to hopefully prevent the chemical reaction.

It really tends to be a Trumpeter problem with kits they released in the early 2000s that used rubber tires.

Ok cool thanx guys.

On my trumpeter 1/32 Mig 17 I built years ago the "plastic" tyres ate the wheelhubs so I will take care and maybe dip the painted wheels in future or similar as sugested. I am interested to test my very limited armour building skills on this kit.

I want to try some of the weathering tecniques I saw on you tube :-)

Theuns

The vinyl melting styrene issue has happened on older tank kits, like the 1960-70 Aurora 1/48 scale armor. More recently, Trumpeter's wheeled Chinese Jeeps, BJ-212A kits had vinyl tires that melted and damaged the wheels and surrounding plastic.

I know there were some issues with the separate rubber rimmed road wheels in Academy's M60 series tank kits.

A way to prevent the melting is to prevent the unpainted plastic from touching the unpainted vinyl. Just to be safe, I dip the vinyl tires in Future acrylic floor polish to give them a protective coating before assembling the rubber rims to the road wheels.

I am not aware of any current tank model's vinyl tracks that will melt the styrene.

In nearly 50 years of building armor models, I have never had vinyl tracks eat into styrene running gear. I’ve had some tracks get brittle and snap with age or tension, but that’s about it. The new gluable single length soft tracks tend to break or disintegrate quickly.