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After many years, I had this funny twinge. Eyes twiching, involuntary spasms & visions of mud, loads of weathering & tank tracks. So it all came to a head when I sent the scouts out to hunt me down a Tamiya 1/35 Leopard 2A6 at the Peterborough show. While I was doing the usual normal stuff like looking for appropriate 1/72 things with wings on Stuart found me the cure for my secret craving. A nice Tamiya 1/35 Leopard 2A6 for £25.00! Thankfully the previous owner had stashed away some photo etch & a replacement aluminium barrell. Now I do like tanky things but to me these Leopard 2A6's are how a tank should look, much like a Ford Granada Mk.II looks like a real car! Every car after 1985 just looked wrong. It was great fun to build, no proplems going together whatsoever & the moulding on the barrell halves were so good it looked as good if not better than the relacement gun barrell. For the paints I used Ammo Mig paints & for the weathering I used some washes & pigments from Ammo. I also added some wire to represent chains for the flare discharger caps & added some broom bristles for the whip arials. Like I say this is basically my first tank in about 40 years, so when it came to tackling the rubber tracks which came with the kit I wasn't sure if I should prime them first then paint & give them the wash treatment. I actually attacked them first with the Ammo Mig Tracks Wash first which dried into the rubber & gave it the base colour. I then went at them with Mig "Earth" then left that to partially dry & added some pigment to them. I finally sprayed an acrylic matt on the tracks to seal them in. Well it worked & looked fine to me! Weathering of the superstructure & the turret I used some panel line washes & some oil spot filtering. I'm not sure if I did too much or too little to be honest, but it didn't look too bad through the lens of the camera. Got a few more wingy projects to go through & at some point I will have to make a nice diorama base for it, later... Thanks for looking, now I've got to decide on another similar subject. I like modern heavy tracked vehicles & was looking at possibly doing the Ariete which does look similar to the Leopard. Martin