Tamiya Tiger I (Early)

Y'all know Tamiya has released a passel of Tiger I kits over the years. I think maybe executives at Tamiya get a bonus for how many new Tiger I kits the company creates.

Well, this one might be the best. It's not a new kit or anything, but these days I'm actually digging deeper into my kit stash than before, and dusting off some of these kits that might have a few years on them.

The subject: Early Production Tiger E, a German heavy tank serving from 1942 to 1944. It was biggest and meanest production tank of its day, and was much feared by its enemies - but it suffered from serious mechanical issues, mainly due to its size and weight, and the complexity of its design.

The kit: Tamiya kit number 216 (35216), which generally retails for around $35.00. Back in the day, I remember Tamiya Tigers having hopelessly inacuurate roadwheels and overly simplified suspesion systems, but this kit is a huge improvement on all that. The roadwheels and tracks, etc., are nicely detailed and are accurate, at least as far as the interleaving system goes.

For a stock kit, the detail is acceptable, if not a bit simple. I built it OOB, which basically means that I was somehow able to resist the urge to add tons and tons of aftermarket doo-dads. By some odd twist, I did not replace the two-piece, split-down-the-middle plastic barrel with a nice, shiny, turned aluminum one. I also did not use Modelkasten or Fruilmodel aftermarket tracks, but instead settled for the kit-supplied one-piece rubber-band tracks (actually the rubber-band tracks don't look half bad in this kit). And contrary to popular belief, proper track sag can be achieved using the rubber-band tracks. It just takes a little cyanoacrylate and a little finesse.

The kit provides detail and decal options for four or five different actual vehicles. I chose one serving in North Africa with the DAK in 1943 (the turret numbers are the only marking for this vehicle, according to kit instructions).

Dragon ZiS-5

Subject: ZiS-5. This a light truck built and fielded in WWII (and earlier) by the USSR.

The kit:

This is the Dragon kit. The box art looks a lot like the old Italeri/Testors kit, although I'm sure the old Italeri/Testors kit was of higher quality. This one was actually manufactured in Russia by Alan Models.

As I mentioned in my FSM post, the kit itself is a mess of flash, short shots, sinkholes, silvered plastic and yellowed, shattering decals. The "rubber" tires, which are made from a rubbery substance that I'm not sure is from this planet, are impervious to all attempts to trim the hard seam that runs all the way around each tire, and don't take any kind of paint that I have (acrylics, enamels and laquers just slide right off).

Further, in my kit the tires were pressed into the truck's frame. What I mean is, when I opened the kit box for the first time, the tires were actually embedded in the plastic parts. The result of this was that once the kit was built, if you were to pick up the truck and look underneath at the frame, you'd see deep tire treads pressed into it.

The good parts? Well, for one thing, there are only 140 parts in the whole kit (by contrast, some of the newer Dragon Tiger I kits contain more aftermarket detail parts than that). Although the fit is extremely poor, you can slap this puppy together in a couple of days. I built mine over a weekend.

The PPSh is from one of the old Tamiya figure kits. Russian Tank Riders or something like that.