Hi Pat,
Aurora, now there’s a famous name! Are you sure you want to build an Aurora? It’s probably worth more in the box than a more advanced kit of later vintage and larger scale!
Vinyl tracks – I LOVE 'em! Link-and-length tracks have me thoroughly intimidated, I’m still summoning the intestinal fortitude (guts) to “get stuck in” and build a set. In the meantime, I have a great time with vinyls. I just completed a set of Tamiya vinyl tracks today. The method I used was very straight-forward:
1: Spray a base color – I use enamels, no priming needed (at least on Tamiya’s vinyl formula), and they’re rock-hard durable when dry. Model Master Interior Black is a great tire-black which itself primed everything and gave the pads and blocks a natural rubber sheen.
2: Drybrush – the color of your tracks is going to reflect the country over which the tank is operating, whether dry, muddy, or a particular type of soil. (Vietnam, for instance, was famous for its red dust, so armor operating in that theatre would logically tend reddish in the weathering process.) So, choose your basic country-color and drybrush everything, leaving the pads and blocks mostly clear as contact with the ground and the wheel rims tends to rub them cleaner.
3: Wash – add a thin wash of red-brown to represent rust in whatever proportion seems correct from your references. Was your tank heavily-used a wet environment, like the winter of '44 when it rained for 19 consecutive days? Plenty of rust! Well-maintained in dryer conditions? Hold the rust to a minimum.
4: Metallic – use a small brush to drybrush and stipple silver or other metallic to represent bare metal areas on track plates, grousers, connecting bolts, whatever looks right from photos.
5: Done! Touch-up as required, use a pointed brush to pick out bolt-heads and other structures that may contrast with their background, and you’ll have a set of tracks that’ll look very ‘busy’ to the eye, and certainly compliment a well-finished hull.
Cheers,
Thunderbolt