M70A2 Krueger MBT, Gulf War, 1991

[Gondor]

the turret side bin and the optics are utterly inspired Jakko     the use of tape and then strengthen and fill is just genius, i had thought that you'd use a thin  piece of platic card and nibble a semi circle and glue against the bars, but that is far more elegant, and im going to steal it, unashamably 

Totally agree with the above comment's. Both ideas will be used if and when I find the need to   

Gondor

[Pellson]

While I'll never ever build anything in 1:35, this is absolutely mind-bogglingly inspiring, and I'm drooling over each new post. Loving this! 

[zenrat]

While I'll never ever build anything in 1:35...

Not tempted by a Land Rover?  You could do stuff to one you would never be allowed to do IRL.

[Pellson]

While I'll never ever build anything in 1:35...

Not tempted by a Land Rover?  You could do stuff to one you would never be allowed to do IRL.

The things I do IRL are best experienced driving the car, and while the 1/35 scale certainly is bigger that my usual 1/72, I still fear I won't fit.. 

Still looking for a good Defender in 1/72, though. There are a few Series, but no flat fronters out there. 

[Jakko]

Thanks, all

i had thought that you'd use a thin  piece of platic card and nibble a semi circle

That's what I tried at first, in various ways, and most of them would have worked if I had had only two bars to put a brace between (even then I got it wrong on about half the trial pieces I made), but getting all three semicircles spaces right just didn't want to happen. I suspect someone with better fabrication skills than I have, would have done it that way easily. The method I did use makes braces that are far too thick to use for, say, an accurate representation of the M1 Abrams's bins — but these are not that, so I can get away with a thicker piece

[Wardukw]

Dude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen 
That idea for the frame was a bit of brilliant thinking mate and all in all the best way to do it ...making holes that small would be a real pain and if for going for scale it would make it even more of a pain 🙃.

Have a idea about your anti skid panels ..have a you used silica sand ? .
It's extremely fine sand which I've used for anti skid panels and it scales better than beach sand ..a small amount goes a long bloody way that's for sure..it's also known as paving sand in some places.
Not as cheap as beach sand tho 

[Jakko]

I hadn't thought of that, though I have considered sand for birdcages at some point — cheapness won out, though However, I think that before I need antislip surfaces in future, I will buy a set of this. I didn't know it existed until a few weeks ago, but I saw somebody use it on a model on another forum, and it looks ideal — thin enough and a fine enough texture to be convincing, and no more messing about with glue or acrylic gel.

[Wardukw]

Yeah I forgot about that ..it's sticky ultra fine sand paper 
I believe Ammo does a paint or something like that just for anti skid panels..I'll be doing some of this type of work soonish 
Might get the sand cause getting either of those two here is not gonna happen.

[kerick]

Try Rustoleum spray can of Terra Cotta texture paint. It's just gritty enough for the anti slip coating. It comes out a brownish color but you can paint it whatever you need. I've used it on a couple of tank projects and looks just right.

[Rick Lowe]

Dude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen 

Thirded (or Fourthded, whatever)... 

Always nice to see this sort of in-depth build article. 

[Wardukw]

Dude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen 

Thirded (or Fourthded, whatever)... 

Always nice to see this sort of in-depth build article. 

It's is indeed mate...get the juices flowing again it does .
 
Part of me wants to do another one of these yet a bigger part don't 🙃 

[kerick]

Dude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen 

Thirded (or Fourthded, whatever)... 

Always nice to see this sort of in-depth build article. 

This is going great! Waiting to see more.

[Mossie]

Excellent work, it's looking good.    Interesting subject too.

Would wet 'n dry sandpaper work for the anti-skid panels?  It's generally thinner than 'proper' sandpaper and available in finer grades.  It might be a fair bit cheaper than the AFV Club stuff without the advantage of being self-adhesive.

[Jakko]

In that case, let me continue with the gun mantlet ... The kit, of course, includes the normal MBT 70/KPz 70 cast mantlet, but again, I wanted it to look like it could be Chobham-armoured instead. More scratchbuilding, then. It took a bit of experimentation to work out the necessary shapes, but I arrived at these (partly assembled because I forgot to take a photo sooner):

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The tube is a piece from a spool for thread or something (I don't quite recall) that my father turned to the right size for me on his lathe, the rest is simple plastic card. The tricky part was the hole in the front — that is, the two pieces on the right.

The way I did this was to draw two rectangles in Adobe Illustrator (use whichever vector graphics program you have available — Inkscape is a good one if you need it for no money, or are running Linux) so that they had the width of the mantlet, their height together was also that of the mantlet, and the line between the two was at the height of the point at the front. Then I drew a circle at the point where the tube was to go through it, with the same diameter as the outside of the tube. Here is a quick mock-up to illustrate this (not to scale or even proportions, I just drew it for this post):

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The next step was to subtract the circle from each of the two rectangles, using the "Minus Front" pathfinder operation:

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You have to do that separately for each of the two rectangles, so copy the circle before doing this with the first rectangle, and then paste-in-place to get the circle back for the second one. That gets you something like this:

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Then all I needed to do was stretch each of the two rectangles separately so that their height became the actual length the plastic card needed to be:

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Next, I printed this out and pasted it to plastic card. When the glue had dried, I cut out around the outside to get the rectangular pieces you can see in the first photo. After that, I cut out the elliptical areas too to create the hole for the tube:

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I could then assemble everything into the basic shape for the mantlet:

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Note the reinforcements on the inside, which also help to keep things square. When the glue had dried, I used a half-round file to file out the hole in the front, to bevel its edge so that the tube will fit through — because, of course, now they're at an angle, the inside diameter is smaller than the outside that I cut as per the lines. That done, I could glue in the pipe. This required superglue with one of those applicator pens for impossible-to-glue plastics (I used Pattex Super Glue Plastics), because the material was something I couldn't quite identify, but using superglue straight didn't hold very well.

Here is a comparison to the kit mantlet:

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As you can see, I also added more details. On the right of the mantlet is a large piece of plastic tube as a shield over the gunner's telescope, with a smaller tube for the coaxial machine gun below it. On the left side are some bits of copper wire with thin tubing (the kind Tamiya kits sometimes give you for searchlight power cables etc.) over them to replicate the searchlight mounting points, which were copied from the kit part. The bolts on the front of the tube were made with hex punch-and-die set.

[Jakko]

Would wet 'n dry sandpaper work for the anti-skid panels?  It's generally thinner than 'proper' sandpaper and available in finer grades.  It might be a fair bit cheaper than the AFV Club stuff without the advantage of being self-adhesive.

It's used a lot for this purpose, yes, but the backing paper is a bit of a problem because it adds a fair amount of thickness. I've read of people removing the paper and then glueing the grit only to the model, but don't ask me how they manage that