Meng Chieftain Mk.10 British Main Battle Tank 1:35

Any optics were masked with low-tac Frog tape.

The turret baskets are plastic and PE and build up nicely aided by the plastic formers supplied by Meng to get the shape correct.

The finished baskets.

The lower hull was painted with AK Real Colors Nato Green the track assembled and burnished then test fitted with the turret in place.

I expoxied the resin barrel to the turret and left off the baskets to make handling and painting easier.

The observant amongst you will see that I painted the wheels satin black in the above picture, I was obviously thinking about the Berlin scheme at the time. I took them off and re-painted them Nato Green.

The resin barrel’s muzzle had no internal rifling, so I used the kit part.

Now I went back to the build sequence in the manual and added all the external parts. I have a friend on an armour forum that was actually on Chieftain tanks in Germany until they were sent to Gulf war one, so after consulting him I left off the wing mirrors which were only fitted if they were driven on public roads.

I applied Nato green all over the model.

Now the fun begins with the masking for the black and green camouflage.

I used a combination of white-tac sausages and strips of frog tape this took nearly four hours before I could put on the Nato black.

The barrel was painted with various acrylics and the whole model gloss varnished for decaling/weathering.

Then I used dark pin washes and the oil dot technique to weather it, trying to keep it restrained.

The one thing that Meng have got wrong are the decals. Not only are they very badly printed they are nothing like the real-world tanks in 1990’s Germany.

My friend sent me some details and some spare decals and using his advice all I put on were the 60-ton weight classification and the vehicle registrations front and back.

Ariels were added using 0.25 pultruded carbon rod at a nominal scale length of 2 metres/57 mm.

The whole thing was matt varnished using Mr Paint’s product sprayed neat straight from the bottle.

That was it finished…