What's on your workbench?

[RMD]

Well that's the 1980s East Germans and Poles finished. Gonna finally have a crack at finishing off my 1980s Spams - I did a few about a year ago, but the MERDC vehicle camouflage and Woodland camo BDU uniforms were sending me blind... I think I'll break myself in gently with a box of Abrams tanks - at least they're just plain green.

[grizzlymc]

It may be something other than camo that's making you blind.

[RMD]

It may be something other than camo that's making you blind.

Funnily enough, I just had the same thought on the other thread...

[RMD]

I've spent an hour or so sticking together some Team Yankee plastic Leopard 1 kits (the NATO set) and damn nice they too! Excellent detail, dead easy to build (even for a cack-handed reluctant modeller like me) and with plenty of alternative bits such as FN MAGs in lieu of MG3s to make a few of the many nationalities that used Leopard 1.

There's also an extra bonus, in that there are sufficient parts to make each model with two complete and different turrets - the squared-off A3/A4 turret and the rounded late-model A5 turret. This means that for countries that painted their tanks in the same shade of cowshit brownish-green (e.g. Canada, Netherlands and West Germany), you can swap the turrets around. So I'll be using the 1A3 turrets for Canadian Leopard C1s and the 1A5 turrets for Dutch Leopard 1-Vs and using the same hulls for both.

With a bit of fettling of the 1A5 turret (e.g. filling the slots for locating the 1A5's applique armour), the early Leopard 1A1/1A2 can also be built (used throughout the 80s by Belgium, Norway and West Germany).

All in all, a superb kit!

[grizzlymc]

More of this fettling, you'll go blind.

[Buff Orpington]

When I lived in Goch, a few Km from the Dutch border we would sometimes see a freight train unload Leopards at the station. They would then trundle off north east towards the Reichswald. Never saw any coming back.

[grizzlymc]

Deliveries to the cloggies? The German Version of REFORGER?

[RMD]

Fresh Spams:

[RMD]

When I lived in Goch, a few Km from the Dutch border we would sometimes see a freight train unload Leopards at the station. They would then trundle off north east towards the Reichswald. Never saw any coming back.

Deployment exercises perhaps? The Dutch and Belgians both used Leopard 1 (the Dutch also had Leopard 2) and did regular deployment exercises. The 1 (BE) Corps only had two out of six brigades permanently stationed in Germany, while the 1 (NL) Corps only had one brigade out of TEN permanently based in Germany, so it was something they had to practice. The Cloggies apparently got very good at it, performing full crash-out deployments to Germany within two or three days.

[BaronVonWreckedoften]

So just in time to be surrounded and put in the bag then?