Howdy, folks!
Yesterday I finally finished up that ol’ 1/48 Aurora MBT-70 I’ve been working on for the past three months, and just took some pix today to post for your eagle-eyed scrutiny. Any and all comments are welcomed and encouraged, so please feel free to criticize…freely!
Some background on this kit and build:
It’s Aurora’s old 1/48 MBT-70 Main Battle Tank kit, released in 1969, which I picked up at the annual “Modeller’s Flea Market” in Shizuoka last February. I thought long and hard about how to build it, and since the overall shapes are fairly accurate, I decided to try to detail it up as far as my feeble fabricating skills would allow. When it was all said and done, I had added about 830 extra pieces to the Aurora kit. Yup, I counted all the rivets, too! Over 500 of those new parts are in the scratchbuilt suspension and detailed-up tracks alone. The Aurora kit itself fit great, and its simple lines lent itself well to a big detail job.
Aside from the basic shapes of the hull and turret, everything was either scratchbuilt or heavily modified and detailed. The kit’s main gun and 20mm cannon were useless, so those had to be scratchbuilt, and of course that crazy hydro-pneumatic suspension had to be completely fabricated from scratch, too. Since there are obviously no aftermarket products for this kit, all scratchbuilding and detailing was done with sheet styrene, tubes, rods, and strips, along with aluminum tubing (main gun), junk photo-etched parts, and of course piles of junk form the spares box. A lot of the suspension was created with 100mm rounds from SKIF’s 1/35 BMP-3! If you look hard enough, you’ll probably recognize other bits and pieces from familiar kits. I even stole some parts from Tamiya’s 1/48 Sherman! Thanks, Tamiya!
While I’m fairly confident that the model is quite accurate now, there are still two glaring inaccuracies that I could not correct: the mantlet and the tracks. I tried several times to sculpt a new mantlet, but none of the results were satisfactory, so I just went with a detailed-up version of the inaccurately shaped kit piece.
I searched high and low for some way to create new tracks, but alas, that too was a bit beyond my grasp as a scratchbuilder, so I settled for simply adding the 300 rubber blocks to the tracks to make them look a little more realistic. There are actually some considerable problems with the turret and hull shapes, but I chose to ignore them out of sheer lack of skill. All in all, though, Aurora did a pretty good job with what few references they must have had at the time, and even with those shape problems, it still looks like an MBT-70!
I used Tamiya Olive Drab enamel applied in gradually lightened (with flat yellow) layers in an attempt to achieve an interesting OD finish. After an acrylic wash on a matte surface, weathering was done with Tamiya and Gunze earthtone colors, finished off with a dusting of Tamiya acrylic Buff and a brushing of Gunze’s pastel weathering powders around the tracks and running gear.
Special thanks goes to Rob Gronovius, Bryan (falcon039), and Jason West (JWest21) for all their assistance with ref pix and info! Thanks, guys!
Anyway, enough gabbing, here are the pix!
Again, please don’t hesitate to criticize. It’s the only way I’ll improve!
By the way, this model will be featured in an upcoming issue of Armour Modelling magazine! Gotta start writing the article…in Japanese!
Thanks for looking, and I apologize for the looooong post.
