M60A2

These photos show an early M60A2 under construction (duh!). As anyone building M60s in 1:35th scale should know, the Esci kits (now issued by Italeri and there was much rejoicing) are the best around, but they didn't make an M60A2. Tamiya, on the other hand, did, but it's one of their early 1970s kits, and so is  to put it bluntly, mostly crap. The turret is salvageable, though, so an obvious solution is to put it onto an Esci hull. For more interest, I decided to add in an AEF Designs engine compartment.

The alternative, if you want to build a model of this vehicle, is to buy an AEF Designs turret, which is probably more viable if you want an M60A2 because Tamiya's kit is normally unavailable; the ones I bought came from the 1998 re-issue, but most of those will have gone from shops by now.
The Tamiya turret fits the Esci hull well, but the engine compartment was a bit more difficult to install as it required the cutting away of the whole engine deck as well as trying to work out how the parts should go so that the engine will actually fit inside. (I'll most likely leave it out of the model, else almost all the detail is wasted, but it still needs to fit, I feel.)
The turret has received a coating of thinned-down Revell Plasto putty, stipled with a stiff brush to give a cast texture, as the Tamiya parts are far too smooth. The gun mantlet cover, also missing in the kit but nearly always fitted to these tanks in service, is Sylmasta A+B epoxy putty with tie-down bolts added using a punch and die set.
The commander's cupola is mostly Tamiya, except the machine gun barrel, for which the one from the Esci kit was substituted, and a mantlet cover built up with A+B putty at the same time as the one for the main gun.
For the rest, the model still needs most of the small details added to it, and some larger ones as well. When it's finished I'll take some more pictures of it to post here.