Just bought an Academy USMC M1A1, and Tamiya Leclerc on E-Bay. These are alittle newer genre for me as I tend to stay at the self imposed area of 1946 to 1985. I haven’t bought any kits outside of that for along time. How would you rate these kits, and will I enjoy them? They were good deals, and I hate to pass those up. I never really got close to an M1 when I was in the Marines, as we still had the old M-60A1 Rise. Never cared for “Tankers”, or “AmTrac” people, being in the more up close and personal group that is the “Grunts”/ “Recon” members, that we were. They tended to announce their presence rather loudly. [angel]
Anything by Tamiya is gonna be an enjoyable build, especially a newer release like the LeClerc. That kit usually costs quite a bit, but is supposed to be quite nice. I’ve built Academy’s older M1A1 (Did mine as a 3rd Armor Div Germany, Cold War) and used Verlindens detail set on it. Overall a pleasant build that goes together easily. I dont know how much they changed on the release you picked up, but I’ll bet the basic parts (hull, chssis, turret) are pretty much the same. There are better Abrams kits out there, but you already have a good starting point.
The Academy M1A1 HC “USMC Iraq” kit is a mixed bag. It is their old molds with an extra sprue added to update it. The new parts are nice, but some of the older ones are bad. The biggest problem is the turret. It is an old M1 turret w/o the added front armor and is 5mm (in 1/35) too short. The other issue is the track. They left the old T156 chevron block tracks (which were copies of Tamiya’s incorrect ones to start) of the M1 and initial M1A1s on it. The current track is T158 square block. There were a few M1A1 HC (Heavy Common - USMC version) running around with T156 tracks in Iraq a couple years ago, but that was due to a shortage of T158 track and it was replaced as soon as the T158s were available. It can be made into a nice kit with some work and some replacement parts (turret and track).
Here is a review of the Academy M1A1 USMC kit at PMMS. PMMS is a great resource for kit reviews.
It’s hard to judge how much “you” will enjoy something. What I can say is that I build a lot of Tamiya kits, and the absolute worst to build (their somewhat infamous 1969 Panther A), was a nice fitting kit and quite fun to build. I would be surprised if LeClerc wasn’t an enjoyable build as well.