Thought you may like to see what i did with the chains that caused me so much grief... the modeling is almost ok, it still needs a few tweaks.  but now its the texturing...

I have been using shaders to get the basic colour and as you can see it all looks a bit clean. I need to dirty it up a bit, a few mud splats and dirty wheels. Also the barrel needs to look used. Would it be best to use shaders to get the dirty finish or texture maps, or a combination of both?

Also any thoughts or comments on the modeling would be appreciated.
cheers

Steve