1:35 Sagged Wheels Centauro

A wheeled tank hunter from Italy

The B1 Centauro was created at the end of the 1980s as an answer to the requirement for a fast anti-tank asset able to move across a whole country by road under its own power. An eight-wheeled chassis carries a turret with a 105 mm gun, and on a made-up road the machine reaches a speed that a tracked vehicle will never match. Italian units served with it in Somalia, in the Balkans and in the Middle East, and it became one of the most prominent postwar Italian armored vehicles.

Eight wheels, eight footprints

It is precisely on a vehicle with so many axles that a perfectly round tire is the most noticeable fault. A real wheel flattens under the weight of the machine, the sidewall bulges and the footprint widens; on a heavy eight-wheeler that shows on every axle, although somewhat less on the front ones. The set imitates that state and a finished model stops looking as if it were floating above its base.

Recommended procedure

Fit the wheels only once the chassis is finished, when you can stand the model on a flat board and check the plane of contact on all the axles at once. The flattened area has to point downward on every wheel and in the same direction, otherwise the machine visually limps. Pick out the bolts and valves on the rim with a dark glaze.

Painting the rubber

Reach for a dark gray base with a hint of brown, not for pure black. Add fine dust to the sidewalls and a darker, smoother surface to the tread. On modern equipment the dusting tends to be only slight and concentrated in the lower third; exaggerated dirt would look out of place on the vehicle of a well-turned-out peacekeeping unit.