1/35 M70A2 Krueger MBT, Desert Storm, 1991

[scottie3158]

Jakko,
I would never have thought of that nice job.

[Guest]

Thanks. I hope you’ll appreciate this next bit of trickery too.

None of the four sights on the model have any kind of interior detail yet they do have a big opening in the front and a clear piece to cover it. On my model the missile tracker isn’t there, but the other three are. I closed the door of the gunner’s primary sight, since the gunner will be standing on top of the turret, but that leaves the two by the commander’s hatch.

[ATTACH]351661[/ATTACH]

There are some decent photos of these to be found online, but working out the details is quite tricky. After looking at them for a while, you suddenly clue in to the fact that this is because there’s a big mirror in each of the sights: the objective lenses are actually pointing upwards, with an angled mirror above them. Ideally, I’d like to have a mirror in there on the model too, but there just isn’t the space (or at least, I don’t have a good enough and thin enough material) so I decided on a visual illusion: build the lenses etc. both at the bottom and the back of the sight, then add a piece of clear plastic at an angle to represent the mirror. Sure, the effect isn’t exactly the same, but it will do in 1:35 (or so I hope ). The clear bit isn’t there yet in the photo, because obviously these still need painting. On the small sight, the lenses are just bits of plastic card, on the large one I’ll use the headlight lenses from the kit.

[scottie3158]

Jakko,
Nice detailing.

[minitnkr]

Nice research. Looks tricky alright. PaulE

[Guest]

It was surprisingly easy, to be honest. I had been putting off building these for weeks, looking at photos every so often to work out how to build them, but not finding the confidence to do it yet, but in the end it turns out all you really need are a few bits of plastic. The small sight has a plastic card shelf at the top, a piece to blank off the bottom, and four punched-out discs: a large but thin one on each side, and a smaller but thicker one at the back and the bottom — that’s it.

The big sight has two bits of thin strip running up each side with a small bit of rod in front, the big ring (a slice of ±7 mm tube) on the back, a length of rod on one side of the window, and what I think is a a wiper motor from a bit of plastic strip and a random piece of leftover round material from a kit — this last thing built twice, once at the bottom and once up at the top to be the other's reflection. Again, that’s it (well, aside from another bit of tube and a banking plate in the opening in the turret roof that the sight sits over).

[Guest]

Here are the optics in place:

[ATTACH]351791[/ATTACH]

It’s difficult to see in this photo (easier on the real thing), but with the angled piece of clear plastic in place, it looks fairly convincingly like at the back there is a reflection of the lens on the bottom. Neither of the two is glued down yet, though, as I need to do some more work on the turret and I don’t want them being in the way.

Also the turret rear:

[ATTACH]351792[/ATTACH]

This is the kit’s stowage basket, with American-style antenna mounts and a wind sensor like that of the M1 Abrams, both scratchbuilt from sprue, plastic rod and card, and some punched hex nuts.

[scottie3158]

Nice work on the sights.

[Guest]

My i'm stunned, some great work Jakko , most impressive indeed.

[Guest]

Thanks, though as I said above, it’s not actually difficult work Largely because these pieces are so small, a few bits of plastic go a long way.

I’ve decided against using the eddiesolo method for the anti-laser coating, because those weren’t in use yet in 1991 — photos of M1s in the Gulf War show plain periscopes, not pink-tinted ones, so the kit glass will do on these.

[Guest]

More scratchbuilding fun. Naturally, if the front of the turret is uparmoured with Chobham, then so would the gun shield be. I figured this would be a fairly simple wedge shape, as there is no room for a more internal shield like on the M1. Working out the shape of the side panels proved quite tricky, though, and the hole through the front was only slightly simpler.

Here are the basic parts:

[ATTACH]352095[/ATTACH]

First was the round bit, which will go around the plastic tube I already have sticking out the front of the turret. My father made this for me on his lathe, from some scrap plastic (a bobbin of some kind, I think) that was about the right size of 11 mm diameter. Unfortunately it seems to be polyethylene, which is hard to glue, but I’ve got a pen that will probably allow superglue to stick to it.

After that I built the sides with a bottom plate that you can see on the left in the photo, which was fairly straightforward once I had one side plate the right size and shape. I made the second one by tracing the first on plastic card and cutting it out, which left it a little oversize. I then clamped them both into my modeller’s vice and filed the second part down to match the first.

The angled front plates need a hole trough them for the round part, and this could be quite tricky to get right, because this will be part of an ellipse, not a relatively easy to draw/cut circle. What I ended up doing was draw a front view in Adobe Illustrator: just two rectangles and a circle. I then subtracted the circle from the rectangles, leaving a perfectly circular hole. Then all I had to do was stretch each of the rectangles to the actual height of the plate (real height rather than height in the front view), which also stretched the circle to the right shape and size. Printed them out, cut them from the paper and pasted that to the plastic card to get what you see in the photo.

With the holes cut out, the plates then looked like this:

[ATTACH]352098[/ATTACH]

They still need their edges bevelled so the tube will fit, but I’ll only do that when the glue has set on the pieces now I glued them into the mantlet:

[ATTACH]352097[/ATTACH][ATTACH]352096[/ATTACH]

As you can see in the back view, I also added reinforcements from 2 mm square rod, to make sure the pieces stay where they are and won’t come loose when I begin filing out the hole.

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
Very good work indeed. All the research and scratching does you credit. Soldering and then bending the light guards has made a great job. The bars on the stowage baskets are brilliant - I would not have come up with that method in a million years.
Look forward to further top work.
Jim

[Guest]

Thanks The stowage basket bars show the value of thinking outside the box when the usual methods don’t work, if you ask me.

I’ve now got the mantlet filed out far enough that everything fits together:

[ATTACH]352115[/ATTACH]

The bits aren’t glue together yet, but you can see it fits very nicely onto the turret, meaning that for once, I got things to line up as they should I did discover that I need to remove a bit from the lower back edge, because gun depression is rather poor, and of course close up the top. Other things to do on the mantlet are drilling holes for the telescopic sight and coaxial machine gun, plus probably add searchlight fittings.

Here’s most of what I’ve got so far — all that’s missing are the side skirts, remote machine gun turret and two crewmen:

[ATTACH]352116[/ATTACH]

The gun barrel is from a Tamiya M1A1. I actually worked out where the trunnions should be to balance the gun on the real tank, rather than just sticking the gun onto the existing mantlet parts, and found it would need to go about 10 mm further forward on the model than it is here. The reason I didn’t put it that far forward is because of the much enlarged mantlet I built, which would probably re-balance the gun due to its weight being right in front of the trunnions.

[Mickc1440]

Great scratch work Jakko

[scottie3158]

The scratch work looks great but how did the driver get in and out plus there doesn't seem to be any room to drive headout.

[Guest]

You see the big cupola on the turret, with the hatch vertically open? That’s where the driver sits. This is what the station looked like inside the tank:

[ATTACH]352122[/ATTACH]

The main idea behind the MBT 70’s layout was that the crew could be best protected from NBC attacks by putting them all in the turret, as that would mean only one compartment needed to be shielded. The driver’s station contra-rotated so it kept pointing forward. It could also be locked in four positions: 12 and 6 o’clock and at about 50 degrees left and right (all relative to the turret), the latter two to allow the use of one of the side periscopes in case the front one was damaged. The main problem, aside from complexity, was that drivers got motion sickness exactly due to this contra-rotation, even though the designers had tried to minimise that by putting his seat as close as possible to the turret’s centre of rotation.

On the American prototypes, there was also a TV camera on the glacis plate, with a monitor by the driver’s seat, but this apparently didn’t really help much. The Germans didn't see the point of it, anyway, so their prototypes didn’t have it. I’m still debating whether or not to add it to my model.