Leopard 1A4 Platoon

As you would be aware, one of the Cold War forces I collect is the West Germans.  They come with a variety of tank types - particularly variants of the Leopard 1 tank.  Some of these have been a little hard to collect over the years, as many variants were originally made by Esci - which has long since ceased to exist.  Whilst having a bit of a brain snap I managed to pick up 3 ESci Leopard 1A4s from ebay.  Why 3?  Ask the brain snap - somehow I screwed up when I should have got 4...  idiot that I am....

Anyway this is what the box looks like (Borrowed image)

I understand Italeri have now started making the exact same kit - and it looks like this:

So I made all three kits up in one go, and only managed to screw up two of them - but that's another story - and was very happy with the result.  It took me a while to paint them - mainly because I wanted to use a Tamiya spray and of course Tamiya do not do the correct Bundeswehr tank colour...  So eventually after going through a few test cans, I decided to use AS21 Dark Green 2 (IJN) as the base colour, over a black undercoat.  I'll check that later to make sure I've got it right...

I was then able to use my standard black pin wash and drybrush method - using Vallejo Yellow Olive, progressively getting lighter.  I used Elhiem West German crew men, and cut up gauze dressings to make the netting where used.

This got them ready for a game - shown in the last AAR - where being newly painted they died horribly of course.

Over the last weekend I weathered them and now consider them basically finalised.  Here they are:

So that's them.  Obviously I need to get one more for a full platoon, but right now they will have to operate as a written down platoon.

More to follow later this week...

Richard