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1985

1985

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Project Blog by fourtytwo

Recommendations: 47

About the Project

In my teens in the 1980s, a friend of mine and I collected Roco 1/87scale military vehicles, and I always wanted to collect a whole Zug of Leopard 2s including support vehicles, but I didn't have enough money for that as a kid. With games like Team Yankee and all the cool kits available for these, I'll do now what I couldn't back then, and I'll do it much better.

This Project is Active

Thousands of new, much better antennas:

Tutoring 2
Skill 1
Idea 2
No Comments
Thousands of new, much better antennas:

I already exchanged the antennas of my finished Leopard 2 A4 with these new ones – they are thinner, absolutely even and flexible (they don’t bend out of shape or break). New photos will come soon. Also: I’m currently busy painting the other two Leos I’ve custimized – new photos of the work in progress will be posted here soon, too.

Opening hatches and adding extra stowage

Tutoring 4
Skill 4
Idea 4
No Comments

For my next two kitties, I decided to open up two hatches which are only available closed on the kit out of the box: The other turret hatch next to the machine gun, and the driver’s hatch. The turret hatch was pretty easy and straight-forward: Carefully drilling out the circular hatch, cleaning up the edge of the newly created opening, and adding a spare hatch from the open cupola-piece on the sprue.

The driver’s hatch was a lot more challenging, mainly because the plastic on the main hull as well as the main turret-pieces is quite thick – something which I like, because it gives the models a nice weight, but it also is a pain in the butt when tackling modifications like that.

I started by carefully and slowly creating a clean, precise cut all around the driver’s hatch until it was deep enough to create a light outline of the hatch visible on the underside of the upper hull piece. At that point, I proceeded to cut out the hatch from the inside, thereby leaving a clean edge on both the new opening as well as the now seperate hatch-piece. Now I needed to build a small light-proof compartment for the driver under the opening, and I also needed to make the opening smaller behind the driver, because the hatch significantly overlaps the hull there.

When that was done, I could finaly glue in the driver and glue on the hatch pushed to the side.

I also created a small rack attached to the back of one of the turrets right behind the stowage area and put a bundle held in place by two straps on it.

Opening hatches and adding extra stowage
Opening hatches and adding extra stowage
Opening hatches and adding extra stowage
Opening hatches and adding extra stowage
Opening hatches and adding extra stowage
Opening hatches and adding extra stowage

Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage

Tutoring 4
Skill 6
Idea 6
No Comments

To add more realism and make the kitties more interesting, I decided to individualize each by adding stuff like extra stowage, foliage camouflage and converting some of the closed hatches on the kit to be open and showing more of the crew.

First, I workshopped some methods to create my own foliage camouflage and I wound up supergluing teeny-tiny bits of paper to a thin strand of yarn which then can be wrapped around the gun-barrel or glued onto the hull in multiple bits. This method allows me to shape the foliage camouflage precisely and create parts which are hanging off, which makes it look more interesting and realistic in comparison to several other methods I saw, in my opinion at least.

Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage
Adding Nato Foliage Camouflage

The first mean kitty.

Tutoring 3
Skill 6
Idea 5
1 Comment

I’ve started assembling and painting a 1/100 (15mm tabletop scale) West-German armoured company featuring the Leopard 2 – our main battle tank since the early 1980s – and support vehicles. It’s for a game set in an alternate history where the Cold War turned conventionally hot in the mid-1980s – a history which fortunately eluded us.

The challenges here are 1.) to accurately replicate our german NATO camouflage pattern, which is exactly the same on all our Leopard 2s, 2.) to pick out all details, including gear straped on the machine deck or the blue-tinted glass of the periscopes and laser-range-finders without going over the top and avoiding any fancy stuff and bling, since that would destroy the no-nonsense look real-life military vehicles need to retain in model form, and 3.) to dirty-up the tank in a believable way, for which I studied lots of photographs of the real thing and also referenced my memory from when I was in my early teens in the 80s and saw the real kitties when they had their yearly excercises. To add another level of detail and realism, I even made and added the two thin radio-antennas to the turret.

This command tank is my proof-of-concept of sorts and I quite like how it turned out.

The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.
The first mean kitty.

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