Tamiya's M1A1 Abrams tank

I noticed someone thad upgraded the "handle" dangling off the barrel, replacing the photo etch with a piece of styrene rod. I'll try adding a custom handle the next time I put together a .50 Browning machinegun again. 

 

Crap, I just realized that Tamiya goofed up on more things on this kit. Instead of having handles for the side boxes on the turret, they just have a solid blob of plastic. Wtf Tamiya. Will have to remove those four things and replace them with metal handles. 🙁 

Btw, I see now that the open latch is rotated backwards and so facing the wrong direction, but it is loose and rotate, so I can just flip it back. 

Not happy with my photos. Seem a little blurry, I didn't use a tripod but perhaps I should, even for WIP photos. 

 

 

By inserting a piece of flat styrene under the metal handles, I get to have the same spacing height for each handle, as you add cyanoacrylate to glue the handles onto the surface through the drilled out holes. 

 

I noticed I get an inconsistent paint mix. I think I am not shaking the big bottle of Vallejo black primer well enough. Sometimes the mixed paint is too thin.
The idea here is to rely on the underlaying black primer, to try create some shading, but it is difficult if putting on too much paint over the black, have to be careful, not sure it is very noticeable/interesting after adding Nato green later. 

Photo taken together with a tripod: (I should really order some black colored cyanoacrylate.)
I knew I would get into trouble after adding cyanoacrylate around the custom photo etch hooks on the side. This excess glue has to be cleaned off I think, before I can add the camo paint. I guess ideally I should have airbrushed on some white on the black earlier to get more distinct shades between bright and dark areas, but I think this will be ok, as I don't like stylized models anyway.

Things are a little slow. No airbrushing on the weekends, and I also have other hobbies, like thinking of quantum mechanics and physics stuff (just for fun, am not a student).