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Building a B1 Centauro

Building the model

The Centauro I've decided to build was bought four years ago. It's a "multimedia" kit from Corazzati (the moulds have been bought by Italian Kits a couple of years ago) made mainly from various kinds of resin, a PE set  and a decals sheet. At first sight the turret looked quite good, the hull was full of air bubbles, and the wheels were just crappy with dreadful details and the outside tire pattern missing or badly damaged at least on 50% of the surface. For a model worth something like 130 Euros/USD you can expect far a lot more, but anyway I was really motivated by the "campaign" environment and I absolutely wanted to stick to the initial model choice.

The turret
As usual (and may be wrongly as we will see later on), I started building the model from the turret. The first nice surprise was the gun mantlet: it had wrongly dimensioned "holes" for both the gunner sight and the coaxial machine gun. Also the protective lids had more bubbles than resin, so I decided to remove them, to drill new holes to fit copper tubing, and to scratchbuild new lids from a metal rod with the aid of a round file and a motor tool. The gun had some problems too, being too short and "S" shaped. This was corrected cutting it in three parts, straightening them with an hair dryer, and then adding a metal washer to get the right length and replacing the part after the muzzle break with a section of copper tubing. When it was time to put in place the smoke grenades launchers I discovered that with a kit was provided a set of launchers cloned from the ones from a M113 kit, and also their support wasn't correct. So I scratchbuilt it from a section of plasticard and replaced the lauchers with the one from a  Leopard coming from the spare box and  detailing them with scratchbuilt chain as shown in this thread.
From a scrap piece of fabric coming from an old shirt, I added the mantlet protection canvas and with copper wire of different sections I replicated all the supports and the wire holding it in place.
The railings at the back of the turret were made out of copper wire using the supports provided on the PE sheet to hold them in place. Instead of gluing them I prefer to use a solder to put together metal parts. I also scratchbuilt from copper tubing of different diameter the antenna case on the ceiling of the turret. The antennas came from a guitar string and the lifting handles from metal rod (same aqs per the mantlet lids) with the weld seams simulated using Milliput.