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Armour Bits
Leopard AS1 Conversion
Kit No. 35-008
By Mark Powley
Sapmail, August 2002
While the Australian Army's Leopard AS1 looks like the Leopard 1A4 there are quite a few differences between them. Australian Leopards use the Belgian SABCA integrated fire control system and a tropical kit plus a host of local modifications including moving all of the hull mounted tool into three hull mounted stowage boxes and turret mounted carry baskets. This is where Armour Bits resin and photoetch conversion set comes into play.
The Armour Bits set contains all the parts needed to modify any Leopard 1A4 into an AS1. The recommended kit is the Italeri Leopard but it can be used with the Tamiya or Heller Leopards. I would agree with their choice as the Italeri kit is without doubt far superior to the others. The conversion parts themselves are a mix of resin and pe. The resin parts are made up of hull toolboxes, commander's periscope, wind sensor, two antenna bases, a fillet block to fill in one sight space, spare road wheel, two jerry cans and their supports and track grousers for those with the Tamiya kit. The photoetch parts include a two part engine deck cover and the two turret carry baskets as well as a few other bits and pieces. The quality of the resin parts is quite reasonable (seen much better but seen a whole lot worse as well) while the pe parts are first class. The instructions sheets are fairly comprehensive covering a couple of pages with a mix of drawing and written instructions. The instructions also cover camouflage schemes, markings and some typical loads as well. The only real complaint I can make about them are that they haven't photocopied very well in a few spots and that makes it a bit hard to see what goes where at times.
Overall I'd have to say that I like this set. Well done Armour Bits. Recommended to all Modern Armour and Aussie Armour builders.
Armour Bits are available from Victorian Hobby Centre, 21a Swanston St, Melbourne, Victoria. Ph. (03) 9 650 4817
An excellent on-line reference is the Anzac Steel website at: www.hobbyvista.com/anzacsteel/ It has a great four-part article covering the Leopard and its variants in Australian Army usage.
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