W.I.P SERIES: Academy M1A1 Abrams Part III Mine Plow (Part 1)

Part I
Part II

With the basic lower hull complete for the most part it was time to move on to the mine plow assembly. I had both a Trumpeter 5 in 1 Abrams which includes a mine plow and a stand alone Dragon track width mine plow on hand and after looking over the instructions of both I decided the best coarse of action would be to cannibalize parts from both in to a useable plow. It seemed early on this would be a fairly straight forward assembly, however this 60 piece mini kit quickly escalated in to an almost month long ordeal. Poor parts quality coupled with confusing instructions gave me a migraine more than a few times and made me want to throw it against a wall and beat it with a 20lb sledge for good measure. In the end I persevered and "War Pig" will have it's plow.

W.I.P SERIES: Academy M1A1 Abrams Part II Rear hull details and suspension

In part one of this series on building Academy's M1A1 Abrams the basic hull was assembled, motorization holes filled, and a non skid texture was added to the upper surfaces. In part two I will go over the details and fixes for the rear panel and the suspension which consists of the road wheels, idlers, and main drive sprockets.

The photo above shows an overview of the rear panel. Everything here was assembled per the instruction sheet except for the addition of two missing lift rings. These can be seen directly over the main exhaust visible by their silvery color. In order to produce these I bent a piece of hollow core solder to shape then flattened it with a hobby knife. They were then glued on with CA and blended in with tiny amounts of Gunze Mr. Surfacer 1000. The below photo shows them in greater detail. They may not be entirely the correct shape but since I am a fan of the TLAR (That Looks About Right) method they are good enough for me.

W.I.P. SERIES: Academy M1A1 Abrams Part I Lower hull fills and beginning details

My latest endeavor will be the Academy 1/35 scale M1A1 Abrams main battle tank for the Finescale Modeler community "Gulf Wars Group Build 2012". The particular vehicle I'm modeling (tentatively) is a USMC Abrams known as "War Pig". It should be noted that the "War Pig" seen in COD4 is incorrectly modled as a M1A2 which the USMC never used, only the Army has batallions of M1A2's. Several pictures I have seen of "War Pig" show it ith the mine plow attached which the kit does not include, hence I may model a different vehicle and save the WP decals for a Tamiya or Dragon with the plow.