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.