I hope everyone enjoyed their Thursday evening dinner. Personally it was shake and bake with a few extra ingredients to give at a kick and to add a bit more of the crunchier type shrimp we are all used to. Tomorrow I’d like to work on my M1A1.
This is my first tank ever as well as being a contributer to this thread so please don’t laugh and help me if you can. I’ll be creating this piece of art and let’s all go from there. Thank you forum members for your assistance in this matter!
Please forgive me, I’ve been having cognition issue for two weeks now. I am a TBI (Traumatic Brian Injury) patient still under care. I posted the wrong photos. I will post the correct photos, until then please disregard the photos above.
With armor there is a bit of freedom you can not experience when building aircraft. Tanks get sloppy, muddy, bent up, beat up, and abused. Nothing at all like aircraft do.
They are the ground slogging, mud splattering, titan machines of ground war. You don’t have to have to most accurate color as the layers of weathering applied will change that color anyways. You can leave scratches in the finish and generally get carried away in just building up an armored beast of anialation without fret.
Make sure you look up tons of reference pictures and just go with what you feel will be artistically pleasing to your eyes. After all, it has to reside on YOUR shelf.
You can really go “hog wild” or just build it out of the box. Either way, its your fist armor build and you can’t go wrong. You might even get the armor bug for a while lol.
I’m behind you Toshi. We all will be and you can count on that I’m sure.
Truly, I am looking forward to seeing what you can make of this kit.
No apology required. I had a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball 37 years ago when I was 27. It was a lonnnnggggg time before I came back from that. I got down to 115-20 pounds and couldn’t even walk straight. I still have a few long term issues; blind in one eye, limited facial expressions and a few other blips (still got a hunk of bone missing from my skull).
Most people don’t even realize I still have problems. I’ve been weight lifting at the gym for 26 years now and I’m far stronger and in better shape than when I was 27.
If you’re still under care, you’re doing really well to be building a model at all. Maybe reading a bit of what I’ve been through might help you find your way back.
Keep a good attitude and don’t sweat it. I’m sure you’ll get better – and you’ll probably come back stronger for it too.
But don’t buy the pickle cocktails these characters are selling. A tank is just as hard as any other subject, in particular because if you don’t weather, you aren’t really in the game.
As you know from your birdcage airplane, these kits put themselves together while you are in the jake. But then the fun begins with tanks. Your goal is to make it look “real”.
Brindos says, well anyone can get dirty without trying. No say I, you really have to try.
You’ll have fun.
I find the darn things a little tedious, but they go together pretty quickly.
Toshi, I have to second what the guys already said.
Plus in some ways armour is less of a pain than aircraft.
1). No annoying masking of canopies and clear parts. Some kits have clear parts for the headlights but you can install them when the kit is complete.
2). Leave the wheels, tracks, and skirts off and then paint the whole thing as a single piece. No masking, no muss no fuss. Then paint the rubber on the wheels, paint the tracks, add them to the tank and put the skirts on over them.
You can try colour modulation here. Mix a little black or brown into your base coat to paint the shadow areas (under the fenders, turret, etc.) use your base coat on the sides and then mix a little white for the upper surfaces where the sun would hit (top of hull, turret, etc). Doog is much better at this than me.
meh. You paraphrase me a bit, me thinks, but aye. As I read that I heard it in the voice of Jack Sparrow lol.
Personally I just find armor building a bit more relaxed than Aircraft modelling. If you get the finish off on a plane it really comes off badly, but armor is more forgiving in that respect.
But you are right in that it takes morer than just mixing up some dirt and white glue and slopping it on the tracks. Weathering is truly the key to armor modelling and that’s one of the funnest parts to do, but you’re right in that you have to weather with intention.
Toshi, you’re going to enjoy yourself. I know you will.
Toshi, go back to your first post, press the edit key, and change the header from “Tamiya” to “Academy”. It’ll make future searches a whole lot easier.
I am looking forward to this as I have never built an Academy armour kit and have not seen many built. I have been meaning to get one of their 35th Warrior kits for some time so will be nice to see how they build.
Generally, Academy has two classes of kits. Their older kits were poor copies of Tamiya kits. Sometimes (M60 series, M2A2 Iraq) they improve them. Usually, they were direct copies.
In the late '90s, they started designing their own molds that are generally pretty nice. The Warrior is all Academy and pretty nice. Their line of ROK vehicles (K200, K200A1, K1, K1A1, etc) are very nice.
This kit (USMC Abrams 2003) is a hybrid that used a copy of the original Tamiya M1 that Academy updated (pretty unsuccefully) into an M1A1. This release fixed most of the problems w/the earlier M1A1 kit with sprue J, but left two major problems. The biggest and hardest to overcome is that the turret is an M1 turret and about 5mm too short. The M1A1 turret is longer in the area of the mantlet since additional armor was added. You can see that the turret is too short around the smoke grenade launchers, they are too crowded. The other issue is the tracks are the older T156 chevron block tracks that haven’t been used since the early '90s. AFV Club makes a very nice set of indi-link T158 square block (Bigfoot in modeling terms) tracks. The rest of the updated parts on the J sprue are pretty nice. There are still a bunch of things that need to be updated or corrected on the original Tamiya parts though. It also needs anti-slip coating added to it.
If you are looking for an accurate M1A1 Abrams, get the Dragon M1A1 AIM (kit #3535). It is light years ahead of both Tamiya and Academy kits.
By the way, you could also go back and edit the post w/the aircraft kit in it as well. Just delete it all.
