Introduction

Tracks are an important part of a tank and a tank model build. For years modellers have been replacing the vinyl single piece tracks with individual link track, looking for greater detail and workable. Orochi is a new company on the block with replacement tracks, and one of their first release includes individual links and workable track.

Contents

The box contains three sprues of plastic track links, 60 links per sprue for 180 total links, and seven sprue of poly-vinyl linkages.

Review

Looking over the sprues from Orochi I was very impressed with the clean molding, no flash, no sink marks, and no ejector pin marks. The black plastic is a tad soft, but has no impact on the detail. The level of detail in the molding is great looking too. The pad side of the track has the characteristic look of the Leopard 1 track.

The assembly of the tracks is pretty straight forward and done by mating two links with a center linkage horn and attaching the poly linkages to pins molded onto the links. The link pins have small flanges on the end to assist holding the soft poly linkages on.

I used a pair of fine side cutters to remove the track links and center linkage horns from the sprue, which will require a little sanding to clean up. Removing the poly linkages can be done with a sharp hobby knife, and if you follow the edge, there will be no clean up require.

Once assembly starts, it goes rather quick. I did find that the center linkage horns go on very easy, and in my opinion, maybe just a tad too loose. But having built another companies Leopard 1 tracks in the past, where the plastic was hard and brittle, and I broke several center pins trying to assemble them. Comparably, the Orochi tracks go together very well, the soft poly linkages fit and go on very well, and hold.

Once together to tracks not only look great, but are workable and stay together. I test fitted a section of the built tracks over an Italeri Leopard 1A5 drive sprocket and it fit very well.

I am currently in the process of building a Leopard C2 MEXAS, using the Legend conversion, and will be using the Orochi tracks on this build, you can follow along here.

I would like to note that when Orochi released images of the pre-production tracks, there was an issue with the shape, and based on comments on the forum, Orochi went back and resolved the issue with the tracks prior to release. Orochi should be well commended for listening to the modelling community and fixing this issue.

Conclusion

Overall I am very impressed with the Orochi Leopard 1 tracks. The level of detail is great, and assembly and fit is great. The tracks go together very well, and stay together while being very workable. I extremely recommend these tracks for any Leopard 1 build.