Just started work on the Revell Leopard 1 and I’m building the Dutch version. I’m gonna try to keep a build log going.
There are a couple of things that need to be fixed on the kit, and the first thing I did was correct the barrel. I don’t know if it’s typical for early Dutch Leopards, or if other countries did the same thing, but most Dutch tanks had a half sleeve around the barrel, on the portion between the mantlet and the fume extractor. A few early Dutch Leopards had full thermal sleeves, but the one I’m building had the half sleeve. So first thing I did is fix the barrel.
I mostly built a Leopard 1 NL from the Italeri kit about twenty years ago (the difficulty of building the smoke launcher brackets put a stop to that model), and I noticed the thermal sleeve as well. I solved it the other way round than you did, though: I cut the front off and made the bare barrel from plastic tube
The Revell kit of the early Leo only comes with the Naked barrel, so doing it that way wasn’t really an option. Instead I inserted part of a barrel of a Meng Leopard 1A5 I have in the stash, that I have an after market barrel for. Easy.
I’m not looking to super detail the model, but some of the detail on the base kit is just too crude. So I removed the loader’s hatch spring and replaced it with a resin item from Leopard Workshop.
The Leopard Workshop set also includes new hatches and skate rings for around the hatches, but while detail on those is nice, casting is really poor. The skate rings and hatches were so warped and the molds had slipped so much, they were pretty much unusable. So I used the kit parts instead and added some missing detail (meaning I drilled some holes). I removed the molded on skate plates for the MG and used the much nicer Leopard Workshop pieces instead.
Construction on the turret is done. I used the light from a Meng kit that I had in the spares box, because the details were nicer than the Revell version.
The bustle stowage rack is kinda crude, but I’m not bothered because it’ll be full of stowage anyway.
