I hate them too,I replace them.

I find these guys reasonable,and the tracks easy to use  https://quickwheelstore.com/

Hello!

I like link and length tracks a lot, definitely better than vinyl tracks.

What's your main problem with them?

One thing I look for when building them is dry fitting the last segments to see if the ends will meet nicely. I usually start with the lower run, that's usually flat for vehicles standing on a flat surface. I agree, if you wanted to pose your track on some fancy obstacle, link and length tracks are probably not for you... So let's assume we're talking about flat surface, I glue the flat run to the bottoms of the whhels with contact with the ground. Then I work my way up to the idler and the sprocket. When I'm about done wrapping around the idler and sprocket with the individual links, I fit the top run to see if it's too long or too short. Sometimes the tracks fit just right. Sometimes they are too long - then I take out a link (or more out). If the tracks are a half a link too long, then I bend the top run more, this way I can usually take up to one link excess out. Once I had the tracks a little too short - I had to scratchbuild two links per side and I hid them where they weren't too noticeable. It's important to use good glue here - I prefer to glue unpainted tracks to unpainted wheels with butyl acetate (welding them together) and paint everything later. Most of the time I can have the rtacks removable as a subassembly to make the painting easier - like that:

You can see my scratchbuilt links here too.

Hope that helps - thanks for reading and have a nice day

Paweł

Pawel has some good advice here! I pretty much do the same thing. 

Never tried it on a 1/48th kit though, I find the bigger the tracks the easier they are to work with though, Tiger tracks are easier than something small like a Panzer III. Seems 1/48th would be a real pain here. 

As said Pawel has good advise and I'd think a web search should find a lot more. There probably are a couple of good YouTube videos out there that show you how to do it.

One trap I found out right away is that for plastic track, the layer of paint on them and the road wheels adds just a little bit of thickness.  I had assembled a small scale AFV with link-and-length prior to painting, got a perfect dry fit, but was dumbfounded when I tried assembling the painted track sections to the finished model.  I came out fractionally short and could not figure out what I had done wrong.  The culprit was the layers of paint.

Pawel's method of gluing the tracks to the road wheels will of course eliminate that problem, but how does everyone paint between the roadwheels?  I am pretty lousy at hand painting so feeble minds would like to know.

Well, there are some options...

If the track is supposed to be dirty (and it is), you can spray everything dirt colour and it will reasonably go between the road wheels too, at least as far as anybody can see. Other trick would be to paint surfaces that would be hard to get when assembled with black or dark Gunze paint. Thing is lacquer thinner, Tamiya thin and stuff like that dissolve Gunze paint, so it doesn't have to be scraped away when glueing with solvent type glue. And the dark colour simulates shadow.

Let me get back to the "dirty" concept - when the tracked vehicle has wallowed in the mud for long enough (and that really isn't a very long time) everything gets dirty, especially the parts in contact with the ground. Instead of painting the model paint colour and then trying to dirty it up, I paint the model dirt colour (at least the lower half) and then on this I paint the areas where the mud was scraped away or something like that. This way painting gets easier and the vehicle looks better IMO. So for tracks I paint everything dirt colour, and then I pick up the centers of wheels with camouflage colour and the edges of tracks with steel colour (where it has been abraded away) - guide teeth surfaces, sprocket working surfaces and where it touches the track etc.

I hope the above is understandable - god luck with your tracks and have a nice day

Paweł

Brilliant Pawel! And thanks for the explanation!  I think I'll have to try that on my next plastic track project.