As some of you may or may not know, I'm hosting the 'Bear Trap GB' and for this GB I'll be building the Tamiya 1/35 T-72 M1 kit. That means alot, and I mean ALOT of modification will be going into this build to back-date it into a T-72 that was in Afghanistan for developmental/testing purposes during the Soviet-Afghan War. As for the kit, I got this Tamiya kit for just $10.00
and it included everything(nothing missing or broken), heck it even came with an ancient Tamiya catalog! As you can see, the kit comes with rubber-band tracks
(and I couldn't justify paying the prices for AM tracks,) I did however pick up a pair of Friul drive spockets. So that will be the one AM part on this kit, everything else will be OOB or scratched. Oh, what fun.
As for construction, I was able to get started on the hull. Let me just say this hull is pretty much perfect, no seams to clean, no flash, crisp detail, and only one, yes one ejector pin mark that requires clean up!(you can see it right there, dead center of hull) After getting over the fantastic hull, I started getting some pieces on like the front dozer blade.
As for the suspension arms it's another story.....dang Tamiya.
The suspension arms may have no seams, but they do have a large hollow portion that needs to be filled in. So I had to go and get the Testor's Contour putty to fill in the holes, which were suprisingly deep.
Now the next step is to figure out the paint.....I was gonna use MM Russian Armor Green but it doesn't look quite right(maybe I'll try an olive drab mix.) Either way I'm open to suggestions, (maybe I'll find something at my LHS tommorrow.)
All comments, questions, and suggestions welcome!