T-55 tanks for AK47 Republic

 Some armour for use in AK47 Republic in the form of a couple of T-55s.  These are from m_bergman's excellent collection of 1:100 post war/modern vehicles.  Peter Pig professional infantry give an idea of the size.

T-55s and suporting infantry.

The turrets for the tanks printed fine but the hull caused problems.  The first 2 attempts, printed flat on the build plate, ended up up with some flat blobs on the bottom of the resin vat where it had pulled off the build plate.  All my Epic scale 40K tanks printed fine on the build plate, but the T-55 is far larger which no doubt caused the problem.  Fortunately it didn't use much resin and I re-supported the tanks at an extreme angle which meant I could squeeze them both onto a single build plate instead.

This wasn't quite how I expected them to turn out.

I've used a Vallejo Khaki base coat, Humbrol 249 sand brown camouflage patches, then Humbrol dunkel grun / dark green edging between the other 2 colours. Tracks were painted brown, then drybrushed silver, the pintle-mount HMG was also painted silver.  A coat of Pledge/Future floor polish sealed it all, then I used a thinned black ink/matt varnish shading wash.  Giving it the gloss varnish first makes the shading wash pull away from the flat surfaces and settle into the recesses more, though enough still remains to dull down the shiny finish.

Left side detail.

Black details wree added - the caps over the smoke dischargers (R side of turret) and the various lights - in the reference photographs that I've looked at, they generally seem to appear black rather than silver.

Right side detail.

A sandy drybrush finished the tanks off, or so I thought.  After a couple of days though, I decided I wasn't happy with the tracks and wheels, so gave them another coat of shading wash which darkened the tracks nicely.  The wash was just dotted into the holes in the wheels rather than completely across them.  Job done!

Business end.

These have come out well, I shall definitely be adding a few more to my forces once some of my other printing projects have been completed.  I'll add some more stowage to the next ones.

Showing some top detail.