Now tucked away in there is a box marked 'Science Treasury' - Light Tank Stuart Mk 1. "Goodie!" thought I - I wanted a Stuart as they are a very cool little tank, and not so overpowered.
If you have one of these kits in a model stash, you have two good choices... first make sure your craft knife is very sharp, it will hurt less when you slash your wrists. The other choice is simply to drop it straight into the nearest bin.
It's a remould of the old Hasegawa kit, complete with a man on a horse. The only small problem is that Hasegawa moulding standards were usually very high. 'Science Treasury' - well theres aren't, and they also seem to have widened the channels on the sprue, and misaligned the moulds. There is so much flash, so many blocked holes, warping, ejector pin marks, and bits that seem to just have holes where they shouldn't, that the kit has become a nightmare. Nothing quite lines up, and the work to get the mould lines and marks corrected is just horrible.
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| Bits of a Stuart on the left, Dodge light truck on the right (ESCI) |
Here's the culprit - a whole morning to get it to this stage - (compared to the Dodge Truck - which was done in 90 minutes last night after coming home from a really fun night doing a re-fight of Clontarf for the 1000 year anniversary using DBMM).
Next struggle will be the rubber band tracks, and getting those over the road-wheels and onto the miscast sprockets which took about 25 minutes each to clean up... maybe it's time to check the craft knife is still really sharp.
Why does it have a man on a horse?
ReplyDeleteI am not sure.. although I remember reading at one stage the US Cavalry was split - and within a unit, half would retain their horses, and half get AFV. To keep up with the armour, the horsemen were supplied with trucks towing horse floats. That would have worked really well under air attack I am sure.
ReplyDeletePoor you! To make things worse, wasn't the original Hasegawa kit very over scale?
ReplyDeleteIt may be slightly overscale, but there's a real shortage of 1/72 Stuart kits. It still looks really small by comparison with most of the other vehicles I have. The tank park grew a bit today, built an Armourfast Cromwell, an ESCI Dodge 4 x 4 light truck, and the ESCI 25lb and crew. Nearly time for them to hit the paint-shop. (Ok, meet the car primer actually..)
ReplyDeleteEvery day I have worked on the early M3 - it is now finally undercoated. To add to the issues, the plastic appears to be some weird compound that doesn't glue with polystyrene cement. I may well have to revisit it with superglue. Now that I have built a Dragon kit - never going back to rubbish kits like this.
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