aaronwhite1786

I've got those things pretty scuffed up at the moment! I tried to thin them out a bit, since they looked a little thick on the initial one, but I'm thinking I might just chop them both off, since the T-55 looks pretty cool with parts of the fender missing.

Nice! I'm still debating removing some parts of the fenders, just to give it that proper "I'm a tank that had the misfortune of being taken over by insurgents with no money for repairs" look.

Not a problem at all! I'm happy to see discussion from it. I got my main question answered, but I'm always happy to know more about the subject. And, Zigster, I'm not really worried too much about accuracy or anything like that, the rubber tracks just don't look great, and since I've already glued them into one big loop, they're going to be a pain to weather and paint anyhow, so I figured I may as well try out some of the Miniart kit and kill two birds with one stone. I'm vaguely basing it off of some tanks from the old Arma game I used to play that had some camo with striping all over that looked hand-painted, along with some red ID bands on the hull and turret. I figured it would be a fun challenge for painting and weathering without having to feel like I'm not "making it look real".

The folding was somewhere that really made me wish for a folding jig. Trying to hand-fold the tiny contact points could be a real headache when it was something that needed multiple folds on one small shape. And nice idea on the files! The metal definitely chewed up some of my softer sanding blocks.

The Photoetch definitely came in handy when I was holding the latching part of the tow cable hook on the front in some tweezers, only to suddenly have them snap together and hear the sound of plastic hitting one of the 4 walls in my office before dropping to the carpet, never to be seen again. I finally just said "Fine, it's battle damaged!" and put the PE mount on where the plastic one had gone, just missing the handle to lock the cable down. I would love to get some PE parts a try again in the future when I've got some tools to help shape them. Initially I was just using an exacto knife and razor as I didn't even have the model tweezers I finally got, and that was rough. But towards the end, I started trying my luck with a few of the parts, figuring if they messed up I could just use the included plastic details. And yeah, I was happy to have the metal barrel and avoid the sanding and lining details up on two plastic halves.

The main reason I pulled the trigger on the Tamiya kit was that it had been marked down quite a bit and came with the metal barrel and photoetch parts that I thought would be a fun challenge (I vastly underestimated just how small some of the parts were).

Sadly, I didn't find out about Miniart until after grabbing the Tamiya kit, figuring it would be fun just to have as a first model (well, first since being an adult with actual tools and skills...not the hand-painted horror shows I made as a kid). I'm not 100% in need of any great real world accuracy, since it's not going to be based on anything real, but my main annoyance was just that the rubber tracks themselves didn't look very good, and I was hoping for something a little nicer when put together.

Awesome! I think I'll go ahead and grab them in that case. That doesn't sound like too much work having to just open the holes a bit. The rubber tracks just aren't doing it for me, so this should be a nice little visual upgrade.

Hey, everyone! I've got a Tamiya T-55 that I've been building, and I was wanting to get some workable tracks for it. I see a lot of metal ones that look a little pricey for pre-assembled tracks, but I've also noticed that MiniArt offers their Workable tracks. What I believe I've pieced together is that the T-55 Tamiya kit has OMSh style sprockets, and I would need the RMSh sprocket to work. So I'm thinking the easiest way to get something that fits, the MiniArt RMSh wheels and workable tracks would be the best idea, I just can't really seem to find anything concrete on whether or not the wheels from MiniArt will fit on the Tamiya body without any major surgery needed. Thanks!