Over at What-If, there's an excellent, ongoing build by
The Chaos' of the Tamiya T-55A kit.
Inspired by his build, I decided to move forward on a project I've wanted to do for a while: a T-55 in some forgotten African bush war.
The figure i was working on
here is just practice for the eventual figures on this tank.
I have several T-55 and T-55 kits (including the Tamiya). I thought about using the Tamiya kit (which compares favorably with modern T-55 kits) but the PE set is on order. I asked my cat, Felix (who's been good at picking models to build) if he could pick one for me, but the shelf with the T-55s was too high for him - he wasn't happy being held in a "Lion King" pose,
so he didn't pick one. I eventually asked my wife; I was hoping she would pick the Takom or Tamiya but she picked the
Rye Field Models T-55A Mod. 1981. Fair enough; I'd just gotten the kit so might as well start it.
This is a fun (and for the most part) trouble-free build. Clear instructions, beautiful molding and the parts are arranged in numerical order on the sprues (I hate it when "part 5" is next to "part 72" and "part 6" is next to "part 48"). The kit has workable tracks and surprisingly, I got almost all of the links to be fully workable - only one got stuck to the next track link and that was an easy fix. There are plenty of pins and tracks left over as well.
Here's where I was earlier today. Tracks are on just to check the tension. 91 links (as shown in the instructions) works well:
Most of the work today was gluing the deck in place and adding all the small bits. The lower hull comes in 4 parts (bottom, sides and rear) and I snapped the deck into place until everything was set. This helped when I eventually glued the deck in - ot just clicked into position. There are still some gaps, but some are there on the real tank and others will be hidden by the turret.
The wheels have prominent treads/mold lines that have to be sanded back quite a bit before they look realistic; I'll do that before I paint the model.