One Kit Is Never Enough Part 9 - The Challenger 2

So, officially, the British summer has started and this should mean less time for modelling and more time for outdoor pursuits. There is nothing better at this time of the year than spending a nice warm summer evening sitting in the watering hole of your choice enjoying your favourite drink, or so we are led to believe. Well all I can say is not with the way this summer is working out. Personally I blame this on the drought warnings that have been put in place in certain areas of the UK. As soon as these were announced the heavens opened and the wind decided to spoil any attempts at outdoor activity, unless wind surfing, or kiting is your sport of choice. So all of this has meant a lot more”enforced” modelling time.

Once all of the brass was in place I turned my attention to the side armour and had these built up in no time. There are two areas here that need special attention. The first area is the locating of the side armour blocks, these need to be carefully aligned so as to avoid them looking out of square when the armour is put in place on the chassis. The second area is the bar armour. If care is not taken it is easy to not get these lined up correctly and this would impact on the fit with the rear bar armour. So make sure you have the side bar armour lined up correctly before the glue sets. At this stage i also built the front armour and the rear bar armour. Although the bar armour is not as good as the photo etched sets you can buy, it is still a lot better than nothing at all and will look fine under a layer of paint and dust. On the Challengers that served in Iraq after the war fighting was over aerials and boxes started to appear. Many have speculated what these were for and the smart money was on anti IED equipment. I have replicated mine from plastic card, for the boxes, and brass rod for the turret mounted aerials.

With the chassis/hull now complete it was time to move on to the turret. This was very straight forward to build and caused no problems at all, except in one area, the sight that sits on the barrel. Having made the mistake earlier with the PE screens I decided to make the LionRoar PE sight up first and I am glad I did. When I tried to fit the completed PE sight to the barrel there was no way it would sit correctly. When I did get it to sit correctly it did not fit, so that was consigned to the rubbish bin and I used the kit part instead.  I did replace the Commander’s sight with the LionRoar PE part and the fit of this part was perfect. However you do need to add the top of this sight from the kit parts seems a bit strange to me that you have the sides and front in the LionRoar PE set but not the top. It is strange how some of the parts from the LionRoar set fit perfectly and some are undersized or the wrong shape. It makes me wonder if the PE set was designed for two different tanks. The rest of the turret was very easy to finish off with there being no problems at all. I made the stand for the extra aerials from some plastic rod and plastic card. I did not have any measurements for this and so just went by the “Mark-One Eyeball”. It is not accurate, just a representation of the real thing.

The barrel is supplied in four quarters and apart from a very small seam line went together without any problems. With some careful painting it should be possible to high light the tie down straps on the barrel, thus eliminating the need to replace these with PE straps. If you want you can carefully scrap around these straps to give them an undercut, something that is just not possible with injection moulding techniques, well not yet anyway.

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