The mudguards at the front and rear of the vehicle were supplied as etched parts. These were frequently in poor condition on the full sized vehicles so I replaced the kit parts with thin plastic sheet that could be easily deformed to replicate this damage. The kit parts also had simple indentations where the mudguards attached to the fenders, whereas in reality they seem to have been riveted / bolted on. The attachments were made using disks cut with a punch and die set. I added some heavy looking bolts to the plates that attached the spare track links using a hexagonal punch and die set as these were also not represented in the kit. The water deflectors on the front of the vehicle (parts H8 and H9) were also replaced with thin plastic sheet) with attachments made from plastic rod.
I found the brackets for the smoke canisters fiddly to assemble and found it easiest to replace the retaining straps with some thick self adhesive metal foil that I found at a crafting show. The smoke canister assemblies proved to be very fragile and prone to coming apart at the slightest provocation – you have been warned.
I also had a few problems with the guards over the headlights. The transverse horizontal pieces were moulded integrally with the side pieces. Rather than having a single piece to join each of the vertical supports, they are in two halves that were meant to join in the middle (hard to explain but you’ll see what I mean should you try and assemble the parts). Try as I might I could not get a neat joint and so I removed all the transverse elements and replaced them with plastic rod. The headlight guards still did not look as neat as I would have liked, but as they would have taken a battering in real life I can always claim that they were supposed to look like that.
