David Doyle is a well-known author of over 100 books published since 2003, covering a wide range of military subjects. Adding aircraft and warship subjects to his already lengthy list of published books covering military vehicles, Doyle’s portfolio of publications continues to expand rapidly, while maintaining the highest degree of quality, accuracy, and depth of coverage.

From the Tamiya USA website: This modern Tamiya classic, originally released in 2005, has been updated with plastic road wheel parts in place of the original's die-cast components.

The Leclerc features a 4-stroke V8 diesel allowing a top speed of 72km/h on road and 50km/h cross country, and is equipped with a French-built 120mm, L/52 smoothbore cannon. Series 2 tanks have an air conditioner to cool the computer system as well as several other improvements.

The kit comes packed in Tamiya’s standard, strong box, with each sprue individually packed in its own plastic bag. A nice touch is a folded black and white sheet that provides French tank history and technological data on the various systems that make up this advanced tank. It is repeated in four languages on each page.

Coastal Kits is based in Lancashire, UK, and began marketing their own range of display bases at the end of 2012. Since that time, their business has grown and concentrates almost exclusively on printed display bases for just about any type of model you ever wanted to build in just about any scale. Looking thru the offerings on their website is almost overwhelming there are so many choices, and they will even custom-make bases.

The display bases are manufactured from 3mm Foamex board, which feels like a rigid mousepad. The material is basically a waterproof plastic, with a printed display on one side. The pre-printed image is a high-quality image on a laminated, wipeable matt vinyl surface which, according to Coastal Kits will not raise or bubble like it was printed on paper.

The Author

Alan Ranger was educated mostly in the UK, He started his carrier in the Royal Engineer's Regiment of the British Army. Since then specializing in turbines from the early 1980's on he has been involved in various engineering projects around the world for a number of major global companies.

He has had a number of books and articles published over the years mostly industry related but has also has been published before in this field with books published by Model Art of Japan. He is a collector of World War II Militaria and has also accumulated a large collection of original period photographs on this subject matter. His interests are centered around World War II history in general, specializing in the vehicles both soft skin and armoured as used by the German and Japanese armed forces during the conflict.

For those of us who attended the IPMS Nationals in 2017, we were able to see the 1/48 scale M1A2 that Tamiya would soon be releasing. I built the original 1/35 Tamiya offering in the 1980’s as the tank was just entering service, and I knew that I would need this new release in a smaller scale. The folks at Hauler have released a photoetch set to improve detail on some items and add more/missing details in other areas. I would highly recommend this set to modelers building this Abrams tank, but also recommend that you have experience with some rather small detail parts.