A few kits I put together years ago.
This Panther was built when I was either fifteen or sixteen. It's a Bandai 1/24th scale kit that had some pretty outstanding detail for its day, which was 1970's. It has some damage now from the move to Pittsburgh, as do just about all of my kits, but it's nothing that can't be repaired. Fortunately all the missing pieces are still here. In spite of it's age I think it still presents pretty well against some much newer kits that have better detail.
This next one is a Russian T-62 That I built the year the iron curtain fell. It's a Tamiya kit built strait out of the box with the exception of the dust cover on the main guns mantlet. The molded plastic one that came with the kit looked pretty bad so I covered it in fabric so it would look more authentic. Again, missing pieces due to the move.
This last one is another Tamiya kit that I built not long after I got out of the Army, which would be around 84. I was feeling a bit nostalgic and built a copy of the tank I used to crew. Like the tank in my avatar it's an M60A1, and like the others it needs a bit of repair. This kit has the smoke grenade launchers mounted on either side of the turret which my tank didn't have, and it also sports the older aluminum road wheels. Everyone hated those stupid things so when the new steel replacements came along we were pretty eager to swap them out. By the time I left the army all of them had been replaced on mine, but no one made a kit with steel wheels back then so I was stuck with aluminum. That isn't true any more as there are now several kits available showing steel. Because why not, I added the obligatory two by four between the headlights that every M60 I ever saw on post had. It made climbing up onto the tank much easier to do.
This Panther was built when I was either fifteen or sixteen. It's a Bandai 1/24th scale kit that had some pretty outstanding detail for its day, which was 1970's. It has some damage now from the move to Pittsburgh, as do just about all of my kits, but it's nothing that can't be repaired. Fortunately all the missing pieces are still here. In spite of it's age I think it still presents pretty well against some much newer kits that have better detail.
This next one is a Russian T-62 That I built the year the iron curtain fell. It's a Tamiya kit built strait out of the box with the exception of the dust cover on the main guns mantlet. The molded plastic one that came with the kit looked pretty bad so I covered it in fabric so it would look more authentic. Again, missing pieces due to the move.
This last one is another Tamiya kit that I built not long after I got out of the Army, which would be around 84. I was feeling a bit nostalgic and built a copy of the tank I used to crew. Like the tank in my avatar it's an M60A1, and like the others it needs a bit of repair. This kit has the smoke grenade launchers mounted on either side of the turret which my tank didn't have, and it also sports the older aluminum road wheels. Everyone hated those stupid things so when the new steel replacements came along we were pretty eager to swap them out. By the time I left the army all of them had been replaced on mine, but no one made a kit with steel wheels back then so I was stuck with aluminum. That isn't true any more as there are now several kits available showing steel. Because why not, I added the obligatory two by four between the headlights that every M60 I ever saw on post had. It made climbing up onto the tank much easier to do.
