Nick’s Model Tanks is the kind of website you only get when somebody has been doing the hobby longer than the Web has existed.
Nick Turner documents military models in 1/76, 1/72, 1/35, 1/87 and other scales, but the interesting part is the time depth. Some models were built in the 1960s and 1970s, then photographed, repaired or rebuilt decades later.
A British Mark I tank page describes an Airfix kit built around 1967 and restored in 1997 after the old flexible tracks began damaging the plastic. Elsewhere, Turner shows an Airfix ambulance built around 1969 with the glue marks still visible.
He leaves the scars in.
That makes the site more useful than a polished gallery of perfect finished kits.
It is also a record of how modeling changed
Turner explains old scale conventions, including the overlap between 1/76 Airfix armor and 1/72 aircraft, and notes how 1/35 opened much more room for detail. He defines hobby shorthand such as OOB — “out of box” — and talks about seams, join lines, brittle plastic, disintegrating rubber tracks, resin kits, photo-etched parts and scratch-built conversions.
The site repeatedly compares old builds with later work. A first 1/35 Abbot self-propelled gun from the 1960s survives alongside newer restorations and more sophisticated kits. A French AMX-30 model started around 1975 and was not completed until roughly twenty years later.
There are also hundreds of large photographs because, as Turner points out, modelers need to see the mistakes as much as the success.
One particularly old-Web section discusses the vanished AFV Interiors Web Magazine. Turner saved much of that site’s material before it disappeared in 2004, but explicitly refuses to republish the whole archive without permission. Instead, he offers to help individual researchers with specific vehicle material.
That little copyright discussion is itself Web archaeology: one hobbyist trying to preserve another hobbyist’s vanished work without pretending abandoned pages are automatically free property.
The result is not just a tank-model site. It is a personal record of techniques, materials, kit manufacturers and changing standards across more than half a century of modeling.