Tanks are cool. This is a fact. The Russian T80 is one of the coolest tanks ever made....so I decided to make a replica!

Here's the thing about this project...it took about 9 months of daily work...there were so many individual decisions/steps that it would be impossible to detail everything I did. Using plastic sheets as the base tub, I used a 3D printer (A Makerbot Replicator 2) to print out all of the detail pieces. All pieces were modeled in 3DS Max using pictures from the internet as reference.

This Instructable is going to be more of a guided tour of the process from start to finish rather than a step by step.

The above pics show some of the final product as well as a few shots of how I created a hatch for the turret. The computer image shows the parts I modeled in 3DS Max. Each colored piece is a separate part I modeled and printed. I would then glue the simple pieces together to form the more complex part. In this way I made all of the detail you see on the tank. Simple shapes, glued together to look more complex. That's about it. It really was not complex...merely time consuming. The number one resource I used for this project was PATIENCE.