Hello everyone, This is a thread for the as of now unreleased AMX 40 designed by Inkor. The AMX 40 is one of my grail tanks and thanks to a silly competition Inkor held, I was able to choose this tank for him to design. The AMX 40 was a main battle tank designed for export by the French company GIAT Industries in the 1980s, the model shown here is one of the later prototypes currently at the Musee Des Blindes at Saumur. The tank was lightly armoured only being able to withstand light autocannon fire of the time. It also featured a 1300 Horsepower engine while having a weight of only 43.7 tons.
Unfortunately I've had a very hard time building this tank over the past 2 months due to various factors. As of now this tank is still incomplete but should be done by this month.
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The Design of the tank is not as simple as it seems as the AMX 40 has a rather odd hull design. Instead of a completely flat hull or one that is in a V shape, the AMX 40 has a mix of both. It also has external housings for the suspension arms.
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I myself do not have a 3D printer so I have had to mostly rely on others to help print the various components of the tank... I have gone through 3 and a half hulls for this tank in various materials as well... Aside from that, the first prototype had to be shelved due to poor accuracy prints from PCBway. The picture above is the first prototype. I did get the Tracks, the sides of the tank and the gun mantlet in Resin while the gun barrel was in PA12 Nylon from PCBway. Initially I wanted to get the whole tank printed in Resin partly due to my lack of knowledge of the properties of resin and other 3D printed materials and its ability to handle very detailed parts. I did learn the hard way that Resin despite being rigid and strong is very prone to warping and cracking.
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Above is the second prototype, 85% of the parts for prototype 2 was printed by someone here instead of PCBway. I used JB Weld epoxy to join the 2 hull components and the rear of the tank, also used mr hobby putty to fill in the gaps in the epoxy. The rest of the tank was mostly held together using self tapping screws. The 2nd prototype is still currently a work in progress and is in a much better state of completion than the first.
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Besides building the tank as is, I took it upon myself to improve certain aspects of the tank like the suspension arms. Inkor uses 2 flaps on the suspension arm to secure it and the torsion bars in place. However in my experience the flaps have a very high tendency of breaking off. To fix this I reverse engineered the suspension arm with a groove to fit 2 O rings to secure the arm instead of the fragile flaps.
