can’t be used on vinyl-tracks, so I had
the idea to try some diferent materials.
So, I put the road wheels, drive sprockets
and rollers on the tank, and secured
them with a rubber-band, then wrapped
the tank loosely in cling-ilm and built the
tracks right onto the road wheels and drive-
sprockets, gluing them together, and leaving
them to dry. Then the entire track was
taken of and the cling-ilm removed. The
wheels, sprockets, rollers and tracks could
now be painted individually before
reassembly.
The rest of the assembly was
easy and before I knew it I wasready to paint. The tracks were painted using
Ammo by MIG Track Primer, adding some
pigments to simulate road-dust. The rest of
the tank was painted using Alclad Mil-spec
Russian Tank Green. I was originally going
to have a military camoulage scheme, but
again creativity grabbed me, so I sprayed
the entire tank with Ammo by MIG Heavy
Chipping Medium and let it dry. Then I
added a layer of Ammo by MIG Sky Blue,pseudo-military
T-72B Soviet TankWWW.SAMPUBLICATIONS.COM 55The hull comes with
ready cast shaftsRESEARCH
This T-72 had been sitting in my stash
begging to be built for a while, and
I thought I was going to build it as a
standard Russian vehicle. However,
creativity and lack of self-control often
comes with a price, and for me that often
leads to not following instructions and
building things that are ‘what-if’ projects.
Of late I have been building a few 1:6
handguns from 4Dmodels before starting
on the T-72, and one half-built M-134 was
sitting on bench in front of me as I was
starting the T-72. An idea was being born.
The M-134 is, for those of you who don’t
know, a six-barrel 7.62mm Gatling-style
machine gun with a maximum cyclic rate
of 6000 rounds a minute. Holding that
model next to the Turret on the T-72, it
was obvious to me what had to happen!