I finished the road wheel, drive sprocket, and suspension assembly. Tomorrow I’ll work on the tracks, I’ll probably only do one but one never knows.
I started the tracks today, I finished the lower portion of one track, tomorrow… Well… Today… I will finish off 1, one, whole track… I’ve actually gotten pretty O.K. at indy track. Gonna have to build more DML kits now. I also started the upper hull assembly. Unfortunately, I lost the M240B Pintle-mounted mg. I need to find a new one.
Uhm…nothing happened to the turret - it’s the way the top and bottom are molded. They don’t fit well together - gaps and overhangs. It took me almost an hour to get all that area (wet) sanded.[:'(]
Well seeing as I have begun to start slacking on the kit… Might as well post a small update:
I have almost completed the turret. Probably about half way there? I need to know what to paint the electronics glass, though. The clear part that goes into the doghouse, I believe it is called…
The tracks are halfway finished. I just need to finish painting the other track and then a major block I’ve had will have been taken care of.
Here is the cupola and the other hatch on top of the turret:
I also completed the HVAC. Nothing special. Interesting to assemble though.
Now for all of the “correcting painting” that I needed to do, like where I missed with the spray or had to shave off when taking parts off sprue, I had to mix my own version of Modern Desert Sand… It’s pretty close too. I was able to save some and mix more to put in a Testors 1/4 oz. jar for future use.\
Also, has anybody thought up a badge? Or has the GB leader been on recently?
After a short… Hiatus of sorts, I have an overdue update:
I’m finally get closer to the day that I may see this model kit finished. Now it may look like I didn’t actually do much but believe me, I did quite a bit.
The M2HB isn’t actually glued down yet. I just have it fit in for now. I don’t want to break it.
Almost finished with one track; one quarter to go. Half way down on the other track.
Turret so far. Little bit more to go.
Almost finished the bustle rack subassembly. Sorry for lousy photo quality. And for the two sides, I used a rather… interesting tool to get that 90 degree angle for the end piece:
Not much happening in this particular clubhouse! I’m expecting my Trumpeter -HA to show up from China sometime soon and will rip into it smartly when it does!
Do you know there is overhang between the bottom and the top of the turret on the actual vehicle? As you can see from this photo I took of one of my tanks, there is a noticeable overhang if you can see the tank up close.
And a photo of a display M1E1 at Fort Hood, Texas.
Rob – thanks for the info! Amazing, all these years we’ve been squeezing parts and plastering in filler, and accusing the kit companies of having lousy fit in that area! Ahem!
My Trumpeter M1A1HA arrived from China last week and I got into it a couple of days ago. (I ordered another one because the others are buried so deep in my stash it’s not funny…)
Here’s the well-known boxtop:
The kit is highly detailed, with far less to scratchbuild that on a Tamiya, but unfortunately Trumpeter’s engineering back in 2000 was not very good, there’s a long list of niggling problems to be corrected or put up with – a Tamiya would have been built by now, but this one is being uncooperative with the fit all round.
Here’s where I’m up to:
I’m not sure what kind of result I’ll get, but hopefully it’ll be a good one. It’s not going to be a long build. Oh, the wheels at top right in the picture above belong to another project.
Interesting start Mike. I’ll enjoy this. Do you know where I can get some good photos of M1A1 tracks ? I want to find out whether I can make do with the rubber bands in my 1/48 kit.
Unfortunately, the rubber band tracks on the 1/48 scale Abrams kits aren’t even close to actual Abrams tracks. There is a resin company that makes some for the Arii/Aoshima kit or the Zhengdefu/Kitech kits.
Hi guys, the Trumpeter -HA is moving along quite nicely, only a few details to go before she’s structurally done to the prepainting stage:
The bustle rack is weak and hit-or-miss engineering, it’s hard to see how it could be forced to line up any better but it certainly does not sit anywhere near the alignment seen on the real deal, possibly due to the side frames mounting too low. It’s the most accurate and richly detailed M1 this side of Dragon, and I sure can’t complain about the price, but it makes me miss Tamiya’s engineering!
Thanks! Have been masking the wheel hobs and mating surfaces for spraying, masked the axles, and looking around at other tanks needing the same sort of attention to possibly spray in one batch… I must see if my airbrush is working properly after soaking the tips for a long time, if not I may need to send it away for heavy duty servicing…
Okay, minor update. After soaking the #1 and #3 tip and nozzle units from my AB in thinner for a good long time, I reassembled it and gave the #3 a shot this afternoon and it seems to be working normally – I was ready to buy new parts if need by, these are 24 years old so I’ve had a good run out of them! Anyway, I got the tire black onto the wheels of the Trumpeter -HA and will let them dry overnight, then with any luck get them off the sprues, cleaned up, touched up and stencil the hubs into NATO Green tomorrow.
Further update, the wheels are off the sprues, cleaned up and touched up, and today I used the template method to blow the hubs into NATO Green. It’ll take another session to get them up to speed, there are thin spots on many sidewall areas to touch up, but hopefully I’ll be taking another shot at them tomorrow, after which I’ll be ready to assemble the wheels and maybe even do the pinwash weathering and metal scrapes…
If I may make a suggestion, if possible, lose the CIP’s on the turret front faces and replace with thin plastic card. At the moment, they have all the appearance of slabs of applique armour… In reality, they are quite thin. Those raised corners are actually strips of Velcro in real life.
