Takom Leopard C2

Attention has now turned to the turret with some tweaks to improve it and I've also discovered a problem. Firstly the most obvious improvement is to add springs to the loaders hatch by cutting away the kit ones;

The add-on armour on the gun mantlet features four oval holes so these were drilled to a round shape and hexagonal bolt heads were added using a punch and die set, also the rectangular plate on the left in the picture was supplied as an etched item but looking at reference pictures this is quite a thick plate so it was substituted for sheet plastic;

After fitting the mantlet and canvas cover there was a huge gap underneath and checking that I hadn't left anything off and again checking reference pictures it's apparent that Takom have messed up here;

The mantlet should actually fit OVER the bottom bit of the turret and not flush so it looks like the turret is too short. One solution is to just fill it all in and hope nobody looks too closely OR what I'm thinking of doing is removing the lower lip and rebuilding it;

As mentioned above the bottom lip should fit inside the mantlet but seeing that I've already glued bits into place it should be an interesting exercise to carry out this job without destroying anything.
And it was all going so well too........anyway here's the turret so far;

One thing I should have done is to actually check what needed gluing to the turret before spraying it with Rustoleum Terra Cotta as I had to scrape away the paint to be able to glue things to it. Apart from the hitch with the turret it shouldn't be long until I finish building this. YAY for me! :o)