Tamiya 1/35 Chieftain Mk.5

[TheNordus]

Time for a new build! I decided to get a full house of Cold War tanks (with the intention of heating up the cold war) and this is the first one I've started and finished building! It only took about 4-5 hours to build, with most of the work going into the fiddly bits on the turret. It isn't up to "modern" standards for sure, but for 14 euros it builds into a damn nice model.



Here we go with the first overall shot. The set used some rubbery polycap material in odd places, such as the hinges for the turret hatches and the wheel caps instead of just putting a rubber washer inside like in more modern sets. I tried super gluing the bits down in places just because of the paranoia of them falling out.



Some back detail here. There was almost a gap between the back plate on the turret and the roof, but a little bit of glue and holding in place fixed it right up. Excuse the dust on the model, it seems you can't get rid of all sanding residue just by blowing.



Here's the only "non standard" thing I did, I took a rubber glove and cut off the finger, then inserted it over the barrel to make a shroud for the mantlet. The sorry excuse for a co-axial machine gun tamiya provided snapped off during the process, so I replaced it with a length of Revell Contacta glue nozzle superglued to stay in. Unfortunately it no longer moves with the barrel but oh well. Would recommend adding the shroud on before gluing the turret together though, you'd get a nicer fold on the rubber that way.

Of course the sponsons and motorization holes are there along with the vinyl tracks but at least the tracks have detail on both sides and the side skirts hide the sponson opening so I didn't bother to plug those in. The tracks are so tight they tend to pull the idler wheels back and cause the tracks to bend in a weird way, I'm hoping gluing them onto the hull will limit that.
Hopefully I'll finish sanding the seams down and get some paint on her by Sunday!

[TheNordus]

Here's a few more pictures: I did start painting on Sunday but it's been raining since last Friday which meant I didn't have any sunlight to take pictures.





Still got some detail painting to do and the seam on the gun barrel is horrible (although not pictured) and the clear coats I put on sem to have trapped some specks of dust into the paintwork. Drat.