G'day everyone
well you may or may not have seen my un-popular post about my 1/35 RAAF Bushranger :-)
but, i mentioned that my diorama i am working on will have two major parts, 1 being the bushranger, and the 2nd being this, a Centurion.
The kit is Hobby Craft (which is an exact copy of the academy kit)
Now it cost me $30 at the Model Expo 2004 earlier this year, and i decided i wanted to make it an Australian version, suitable for the Vietnam war,(being the MK.5 Centurion)
but the resin update/conversion kit by legends was going to be $70 bloody dollar! can you believe that, thats more than double the amoutn for the actual kit, now no way was i gona spend this much money just for what i wanted to do, so i decided to scratch build the parts instead, these were the front Glacis plate, the front spare wheel holders, the side stoage bins, the rear 100gal fuel tank, the fume extracors on the gun barrel, the turret basket, and the loaders hatch.
This was all done with 1 magical product....evergreen plastic stock/sheet, brilliant stuff!
with the exception of the turret basket, thats brass wire and fly screen.
well here are the results, still have to make the tow cables and paint it, and then its done.
tell me what you think, cheers

oops i gotta add the covers for the drivers periscopes to

I like it. Good work. Its better to scratch build than buy.

Looks good enough to me. Centurion - the best MBT ever!

excellent work. Nice to see another Aussie scratching stuff to make Aussie vehicles.

Cliff

PS> your Bushranger looked real good as well and if you go to the forums home page and look at the number of views you had on it you may be surprised.

Looking very good Dave. Great to see more Aussie. One thing but, the turret basket. In your photos it looks like a square mesh? Should be a long diamond shape. But apart from that looks very good mate.
Cheers Jason.

Ps Mouse House has a MK5 conversion as well. I have one and its not bad.

G'day guys
Thanks for the coments, a friend of mine came over today and brought me some model ship rope, so now i can make the tow cables, will show you pics of the finished thing as soon as its done.
Jasmils, that mesh is square, but i had no dimond type, so i just made it on n angle to form the best dimonds i could.
Oh and Roo, thankyou, i think the bushrange rlooks good as well :-) and yeah, i was very suprised with the number of views....just wish they all couldve said something about it
cheers guys thanks again

Ola David

That starts to look pretty awesome. Your work with evergreen is outstanding. Knowing not much about the Nam Era Aussie vehicles I can`t say much about that but I think you did a lot of research before you started on this project.
I really like the turret basket too great job overall what colours will it get?

G'day Bob, its base color will be humbrol 159, then i will just give it some wash's, drybrushing and weathering, The Cents colors varied so much over there, when it rained the tanks would sometimes darken so much they looked black, some were faded so much and got so dusty they were a perminent tan color, some looked grey, others were a very bright green, there was no set color as they were all so different to one another.
cheers

Very nice; I can't wait to see this one finished It sucks nobody has come out with a decent Nam version.

I agree Brad, it cant be that hard to make a plastic version of it, i mean i did it, im sure the skilled tamiya boffins could! :-)