1:72 LVT (A)-1 Amtank- Saipan, June 1944, 708th Amphibian Tank Bat. U.S.Army
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LVT (A)-1
(Dragon 7387)
The family of LVT's has been one of my top ranked vehicles for a very long time.
After a lot of searching I finally found one on a second-hand online platform.
The biggest problem - old and dried out vinyl tracks.
These are about as good to work with as raw ribbon noodles, crumbling just by looking at them.
Since they were already broken in some places (and will break a few more times), there were many segments that had to be carefully mounted.
By step-by-step tacking with cyanoacrylate glue, soaking with pure alcohol and using a hair dryer, I managed to achieve a quite acceptable result, even if they turned out to be a bit too short in the end.
Unfortunately, I didn't find any aftermarket products as a replacement.
Built the tank almost 100% out of the box, except for a new gun barrel from RB Model (72B60) and barrels for the Brownings from Master (GM-72-001).
Unfortunately the hatches on the turret (and all others) are represented when closed, but opening them wasn´t too much of a challenge.
I improvised a few details on the inside of the hatch with scratch parts.
For the crew, figures from Germania Figuren (GF 72 WW2-223) were used, which fit very well with the original pictures that served as references.
