Hi all

Here is my C1 Ariete Up-Armoured kit from Trumpeter.

The kit has some minor issues to watch out for but I thoroughly enjoyed building it.

I attempted to fade the Nato Green base colour using Tamiya Buff (enamel) thinned with white spirits applied like a heavy wash/filter.
Used up and down strokes on the sides to attempt to simulate rain and water etc.
Not sure if I'm happy with the result.
Used Tamiya's Weathering Set A, Light Sand all over the kit to highlight and give a dusty appearance.
Still need to practice my lower hull weathering I think.








Comments welcome and appreciated

Really nice job. The only thing that caught my eye was the streaks on the rear hull below and to the right of the pintle hook. The streaks should run straight down and not curved. I have caught myself doing this aswell. The brush tends to curve with long strokes. The colour modulation on the side armour looks very convincing, good job!


cheers

Nice job indeed. I think the color is a bit dark but this could be due to the light during your taking the pictures.
Could you develop on the minor issues you mentioned in your post ?

Olivier

Rick, thanks for the feedback and pointing out where I went wrong on the rear weathering.
Will keep this in mind on future builds.

Olivier, thanks for your feedback. I took the photos this morning and the weather was overcast which may have affected the light. It's a lot lighter in colour in person.

The minor issues.....

The plastic is rather "soft" compared to say a Tamiya kit which caused major problems when removing the grab handles from the sprue. No matter what I tried they were damged. Making your own from wire would be a better idea.

The vinyl tracks are not in Tamiya's league but I managed to get them together with liquid cement and a stapler. Bronco's new set would obviously be better but like most modern tanks most of the track isn't visible anyway so it would be up to the modeller to decide.

Step 11 has you adding PE parts (PE6) to the side armour but the holes/gaps in the kit parts where PE inserts into are not the same size/depth and they ended up at different heights even though the same PE parts are used throughout. In some places the PE parts almost dissappeared into the plastic. Moulding issue?

The mirrors are very soft/weak and are just waiting to break off. Maybe PE option if available would be better?

The smoke grenade launchers, when installing the base parts E15/E16 there are two parts that go next to them E11/E10. What is not clear in the instructions is that these parts actually attach to one another.

ie. E15 rests on E11. I made the mistake of installing E15 first and then adding E11 after the fact which wasn't easy since the glue had set.

The side armour is rather heavy so getting it to stay on straight during the drying time was a bit of a challenge which I lost on the right hand side. Left side went better.

Other than that it is a great straight forward build, don't think I had any fit issues that I can remember.

Only the barrel needed some filling along the joint seam but thats pretty standard with any tank kit.

The above issues don't detract from buildability of the kit at all; just things I noted which could have been better or caught me out.

nice looking model, not often seen here thanks

Thanks for the head-up John. I'll try to remember the build sequence issues when I start the kit.

Olivier