M1A1 Abrams
Breaking Down Barriers

Hayden Scott-Williams
Right, so here's the background on what I'm attempting. I was strolling through a local toy store, looking for Xmas presents for my young nephews when I spotted a section dedicated to model kits. They had a whole bunch of decent looking Academy kits at reasonable prices so I grabbed a couple, including this one. The choice of this particular kit was driven simply by the fact that my regular forum was running a group build with a desert theme and I thought this might be a good bit of fun to enter into.

The plan was to do a purely OOB build as this would be my first tank and I wanted to keep things simple. Of course, that idea lasted as long as it took me to type M1A1 into Google to start collecting reference material. The first image I came across was of an Abrams riding over a crushed car and that sparked the ideas.

While visiting my LHS to find suitable car victims, i spotted the Meng barrier set and right there the idea crystallised. Instead of a car (which would be hell to model) I'd have the tank knocking down and driving over the concrete barriers. in order to do this, however, I'd need something else I'd spotted on my research; a working suspension. From there, it was a short leap to getting the workable track set as the vinyl ones in the kit are completely the wrong tread.

While browsing the'bay for the best price on the suspension and tracks, I spotted the Snickers figures. The idea of the tank crew interacting with the locals fed into the 'Breaking down barriers' idea perfectly and thus the title of the dio was born. The problem is that the US figures in the set are actually a Bradley crew, I think, so I added the Modern US Tankmen figure set to give me some options.

of course, no tank dio, particularly of that period, would be complete without a stowage set to add. The Verlinden one seemed the best bet and, looking at the detail, I'm not disappointed.

So, that's the background to this build. I'm still contemplating getting a Bradley to add to it or even split into two complimentary dios where they can be joined to form a single larger one. Time will tell