After a few years of waiting for a nice Abrams to come out, I finally got mine. Everyone has their favorite war chariot, this one happens to be tied with the Leo 2A6 for me, but really I enjoy almost all tanks even though I favor more modern steel. I figured I'd create a thread to show what I'm working on and to get help and insight from more knowledgeable members on here. Everyone knows what a box-stock tank looks like, so I'll skip those photos and go straight to a few I took last night after my first step of weathering was completed. I'm practicing various techniques and ended up using a micro fiber towel and lots of rubbing with acrylic paints to try to give the Abrams a more real world look. I've still got a ways to go, but it already looks better than fresh painted tan. I'm now thinking I should have waited to put all the accessories on, but most should pop back off with little trouble.







And here's my first endeavor into the world of aftermarket sound. Thanks to Dan at Battle Armor for the tutorial on this budget-friendly avenue of adding some audio realism, I went ahead and bought 4 of these USB sound modules from Electronics 123. They are awesome little units and will work great for an Abrams due to the turbine power plant. There is plenty of actual track noise and squeaks to go along nicely with the turbine loop file I made, so it should sound pretty good moving around. I also made up cannon fire/eject/reload files, specifically 4 different ones with some mixed in chatter so each time the cannon is fired it will play a different one. Turret traverse is also there, so now it's just a matter of hooking everything up! I'm still waiting on my amplifiers, they are 2.5W Mono with adjustable gain and run on 3-5.5V, I'm hoping they give some nice sound out of the Visaton FRS7-4 driver. I'm about $50 into parts for this project and it's cool to be able to show something that has files I made, I'm really enjoying it!