Meng Leopard 1 tracks - help needed

[pigsty]

Can anyone offer any advice on how to stick Meng tracks together?

 

I’m building an Italeri 1/35 Leopard 1A2 and its tracks are awful: under-detailed, covered in pin marks, and so stiff that they try to adopt a perfect circle after you’ve fitted them.  So I looked for better ones and found that Meng did independent links, as provided in some of their Leopard 1 kits.  With five Italeri Leopards in the stash, I thought hurray, and bought five boxes of Meng.

 

They’re unbearable.

 

I can’t get the inner and outer faces of the track shoes to connect.  No matter what I do, there’s always a gap, and it’s usually at an angle.  Fiddling with this and that suggests that the problem is the pins on the inner faces - they must be too big for the holes on the outer faces.  If so, it looks as though I’m going to have to sand down 680 little tiny pins, or drill out 680 little tiny shallow holes.  I’m really hoping there’s another way to sort this out, or I've wasted thirty-five quid and I'll still have to use the Italeri cack.

 

So … HELP! please!

[pigsty]

Well, I think I've answered my own question.  The locating pins in the inner faces are too big, but the solution is to use a few turns of a 1mm drill to enlarge the holes in the outer faces.  You just have to be careful not to go right through the track pads.  Fit can still be a little sloppy, but it’s much better - the tracks should hold together well enough until I can get a bit of glue at them.

 

This shouldn’t be necessary with tracks whose instructions say don’t use glue.  Compared with, say, AFV Club tracks, it all seems over-complicated, and the level of detail isn’t noticeably greater.

 

Oh well, only four more sets to go, plus the 60% of this set I still have to assemble.