I finished this one in the spring.

It's the excellent Tamiya kit in 1/35, sexed up a little with Friul tracks, Aber engine grilles, an JB Model aluminium barrel, Empire City decals and my own fuel pipes & lamp cables (my first attempt at these).









The commander's overalls look a tad glossy in the photos. This is because I painted him with my usual "oils over acrylics" method, and the photos were taken before he was properly dry. He's dulled down since.

- Steve

very cool

Nice Model Steve! THe decals are superb. One question though.... why did you leave off the unditching beam in the rear? Even if it wasn't there the mounts would be......

Chris

That looks great. Nice chipping on the paint and I really like the choice of markings.

Great I love It.
i need to do one of these T-55 or T-62 who knows.
Cheers
Seb

great build.
but the decals on the turret are wrong, this is not Arabic, they look like arabic letters but they are meaningless.

Thanks for the comments guys.

@ Chris S: I didn't want the beam on, and my interpretation was that it would slot in on the protrusions below the fuel tank mounts (not visible here) behind the snorkel. But perhaps I was mistaken, and I'll certainly take another look at that for next time (I have another one of these waiting in the stash).

@ Jamal: That's exactly why it's useful to post up photos of builds here - not being an Arabic speaker/reader I had no idea about that, and simply accepted what it said on the decal sheet (i.e. that it's supposed to read "Saladin"). So that's good to know. Obviously it's too late to worry about it now on this build (no-one who's likely to see the contents of my display cabinet reads Arabic either, so I won't tell anyone else if you dont ) but I'll drop Brian at Empire City an e-mail to point that out.

- Steve

now that you mention it, that it supposed to read Saladin, I can see the word in Arabic, but it's obviously written by non-Arabic speaker, because he is "drawing" the word from an original one, it's hardly readable, the word saladin is like this صلاح الدين.
still, there are 2 words, before and after Saladin that are meaningless, dont worry I wont tell anyone

Nicely done Steve, a really well finished piece.