Just finished up my attempt at the Cheiftain Mk5. Fairly happy with it, considering this is only my second attempt at armour. The weathering went a bit to pot, heavier than I had intended, but doesn’t look too bad in my opinion
The ‘skirt’ on the right side, I attempted to make the, what look like tie down handles? by filing off the moulded ones and then using fine florist wire and small drills to recreate them. Again, not so great, but happy enough for a first ever attempt at anything scratch.
Comments and/or suggestions greatly appreciated as they can only help me moving forward in this genre.
Pretty awesome for your first tank. Looks like you’ve got the basics down, my only advice is just to build more, practice makes if not perfect at least better!
Looks good to me! That really is a fun kit. And regarding your weathering, considering how filthy that tanks really get, your weathering is on the light side. That’s where you can REALLY have fun on armor…
Ah the Chieftain was one of my favorite MBT kits when I first discovered Tamiya! Gotta love the poses of the crew. I built mine in 1979 or so. I acquired another a few years ago for a nostalgia build. Takom has a bunch of Chieftains in various marks, but I decided to stick with the Tamiya to keep the build fun.
Steve, not sure where you are in Hampshire, but if you can, get yourself up to Salisbury plain during the summer, hopefully when theres an excersise on. You will soon see how dirty they get. A couple of days on the plain and you can hardly see the camo for the dust.
You’ll see a lot more armour round Bovington and the Tank Museum, who run tanks every weekday at 13:00 & do Tank Days http://www.tankmuseum.org/visit-us
They certainly put on a good show, but seeing an armoured Battle Group rolling across the plain is difficult to match in a museum. And you get a much better idea of how armour looks when its been out for days on end as opposed to going in doors every night after a nice wash down.
Great looking Chieftain. The camo looks very nice and I like the dusty weathering of your AFV. It looks like it wasn’t playing in the mud. I especially like how your barrel thermal shroud came out. Nice work there.
Salisbury isn’t so far away, I’m near Guildford so maybe an hour for me. Have seen a few when I did a short job over that way maybe 10\15 years ago. I grew up in a small village next to a large army training area (Longmoor/Bordon) where a lot of new recuits were trained, and they taught them to drive tanks/APC’s so saw many, many of those on the roads, bu they were pretty clean most of the time…even threw a few snoballs at them when they went past the school bus stop all those years ago!! (used to make my pocket money as a kid going over the ranges and picking up all the brass and selling for scrap!).
I’m only fairly recently returned to this hobby, so still doing stuff OOB and watching others builds on this forum and trying to imitate their results, sometimes good, sometimes not so good.
Done a few planes, couple of tanks and even a Guillows balsa model my father in law gave me. It keeps me busy when I have one to do…wife not so keen as shesays she becomes a model widow during those times. Thinking maybe it’s time to try a ship next [:S]
I know Longmoor, did some pre deployment training there years ago. Out of 22 years in the army i spent 12 in an Armoured Inf battalion and probably 2 of that on the plain on and off. We often had people stopping on the roads to watch what was going on and it was fun moving a full battle group across one of the roads which run through the plain.
My battalion moved to the armoured role in 95 just as the last Chieftans were being replaced, so never got to work alongside them. Though we did find a load in storage waiting to be sold off and liberated some of there side bins which made nice additional stowage to te 432’s [:D]
