Hi there,
just finished a quick "repaint" of a friend's L1A1. He wanted very little weathering. The original model belonged to the Lancieri di Novara (5°) and after it wears the "colours" of the Cavalleggeri di Treviso (28°). Both Regiments belong to the Italian Cavalry.
This is the puppy as it was given to me:









and this is it after a "lifting" consisting of:

- changing the tracks (the Tamiya ones are quite inaccurate) with Italeri's M47 ones
- detailing the smoke grenade launchers
- painting & custom decaling









More pics can be seen clicking HERE

As usual all comments/criticism are most welcome.
Ciao




P.S.: I just hate painting...

Very nice "face lift" !! I like the paint job and the tracks do add. I was wonderring wher do you get Italian decals? While on the subject are there plastic versions of the centauro and ariete?

Cool. Very nice face lift! You could trade occupations - plastic sugeon - get it

Seriously - nice job. Glad to see you could turn that track around.

Fantastic Fabio. The transformation is beautiful. Great paint. And the tracks are aplus..

Nice job on the face lift. You may want to consider putting some Elmer's (white) glue in the periscopes and vision blocks. It dries clear and will give an appearance of some type of glass. Any problems cross-kitting the Patton tracks to the Leopard like the length?

Fabio,
Avery nice paint job indeed. The vehicle is a good one to have in a collection. Its too bad Tamiya took so long to figure out what end connectors were for on track.I for one would like to see a reworking of this kit.

Thanks a lot for the kind words guys.




Godfather, the Italian decal factory it's me. Aside my "official" consulting job, I've got a small business producing decals for Italy "related" AFVs. If you're interested in seeing what I do pse follow this LINK .
For what concerns the Ariete and the Centauro, at the moment there are only resin kits and unfortunately they're very expensive and quite inaccurate. You can find them HERE




Sabot, thanks for the tip I was just wondering about what I could do to fill these ugly looking "holes". I've often heard about this Elmer's glue, but I didn't find it either in Italy and the UK. Is it exactly the same as the standard white glue?
This is a very old Tamiya kit, so it still has the original electric motorization. So regulating the position of the sprocket all towards the front the tracks just fit perfectly.




Paul, today we have several good alternatives to this very old kit. The one I've repainted was assmbled in the early 70s. You can have a Revell or Italeri alternative which are far a lot better that the Tamiya. Anyway I've got a couple of old Tamiya's kits on the shelf and I think that building them you can fix lots of the existing "bugs" with a very litle effort. For the tracks good alternatives (for the early production Leopard 1A1) you can use the Italeri's M47 ones or the excellent (at least in my view, because I just love to build them) ones from AFV Club

Ciao and thanks again

This is after filling the ugly holes with scrap colour film (it replicates quite well the colour of the anti-laser periscopes). Does it look any beter? Thanks again for the help!



Ciao