ok well I jumped the gun and started mine last night, as I won't be able to work on it much next week.
As said earlier, I'm building the Trumpeter M1A2. Still not 100% decided on the paint scheme, but I'm edging closer to trying out the desert monotone camo. Anyways, I don't have a digi cam, so I'll just post updates here.
The plastic of the kit seems a little...weird...to me. It's texture feels different, and not at all pleasant, but insofar the kit's been going ok together. Last night I decided to put together the lower hull.
The kit obviously was meant to be motorized, but thankfully Trumpeter provide a little 'plug' to patch up the on/off switch hole. I placed this in and used Testors gap filling puttu (gray tube) to fill the gaps around. I'll sand tonight.
Clipped the wheels of the sprue and cleaned them up. There are 16 road wheels to assemble. All of the inwards facing hubs have 4 ejection pin marks, but due to the fact that they'll be almost completely (unless you look underneath and outwards, an unlikely thing) invisible, I did not clean them up. I did, however, take a bit of time to clean the seams that were quite apparent on some of the road wheels. Clipped, cleaned, and installed the road-wheel mounts. Parts A1 are a little stiff going in. Trumpeter has very nicely moulded rectangular blocks into the lower hull that greatly aid in properly aligning the mounts. I glued them all on, then tried the road wheels, and to my great surprise, they all touched ground.
Be careful when removing the drive sprockets, as they're attatched to the sprue in between drive points, so this will have to be CAREFULLY removed and cleaned. Also, the drive sprockets were meant to fit onto a hexagonal drive shaft (again, motorization) so you will have to use a sanding block to thin the mounting shafts for the drive sprockets.
I assembled the rear panel. The quality of the small piece mouldings was not the greatest, and I had to thin a lot of them out to be able to fit into their designated holes. At this point I attatched the rear panel to the lower hull. This went fine, and a little bit of pressing and releasing uniformely spread the glue. A nice strong joint resulted.
Anywhoo, all of this took about 3 hours of my time. So far everything is going well. With the lower hull all completed now, it's become quite apparent that this thing is a BEAST. When complete, it will definitely be the largest tank in my collection.
WHen others out there start their Trumps, fill us (me :) in on the details.