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Scale Models Megathread


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The Tamiya stuff was scarce in my locale til the late 70's..  You could find some Airfix and the occasional odd scale (1/100) Japanese aircraft kit at an art supply shop, but for the most part it was whatever the supermarket stocked in the tiny toy/hobby aisle.

 

If they are still around the house I grew up in (assuming my parents have not tossed them) I may still have some of the wacky old photocopy/mimeographed mail order catalogs we used to deal with pre internet..

 

The first time I saw a real Tamiya catalog was around '83 or 84, and I was amazed.  They were beautifully printed.

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I had one of those Tamiya Catalogs, we had a friend of the family who had a little hobby shop and ordered it for me, this was probably like 87. It still had all their classic RC cars like the Frog, Hornet, Fox and Bruiser, the only RC tanks were the 1/16 Gepard and Leopards. They had just come out with their 1/350 ship line, I got their 1/350 New Jersey, the modern version for Christmas, but they had a big line of ships in that scale, Bismarck, Yamato, king GV, etc. 

 

They had a ton of 1/35 kits in the catalog and a bunch of dioramas, like a huge burned out factory in Russian diorama.  This was well before their push on 1/48 armor.  Sadly they still sell most of those 80s kits without updates. 

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 Nah, by that time I was a 12 or 13 year old Tamiya snob. Though I did build some Hasagawa planes, and a few ventures into the 1/24 scale airfix kits.    I didn't get into tanks until a bit later but really only built Tamiya Armor. 

 

When I started back up in the like in 05, I built a pait of Tamiya kits, an M4 Ic firefly in 1/48 and an M26 Pershing in 1/35. Both very nice kits, though the Sherman kit lacks sponson bottoms. The M26 had spring loaded suspension and was a very nice kit, but still had molded closed periscopes. 

 

What got me back into the whole thing was going a little nuts and dropping like 800 bucks to build this.

http://vid44.photobucket.com/albums/f47/gtora2/100_2218.mp4

A Tamiya full option 1/16 scale M26 Pershing and all the crap to build it. I hadn’t built a model since I was 14 or so when I bought this back in 05.  After building this, I had dug out all my old model building stuff, and much of it was in good shape so I picked up the new plastic kits.

This was the finished 1/35 M26

m26front_resize.jpg

 

This is the Firefly.

Firefly_resize.jpg

 

Both went together flawlessly and were easy fun builds. I moved onto Dragon Shermans, and they are harder to build, but look better when done than Tamiya Shermans. 

Liking post for all the WEB Griffin novels in the background.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yes

 

ya i know, im crap

Meh, work with what you have. You can make the "rubber band" tracks look decent (or at least better), but what's in that picture looks better than 90% of the tank-shaped plastic blobs I've come across.

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wish i had a damn extra plates to work with to make those metal spaced armor cheeks that made T-55s of that era sexy as hell, i could probably make my own but i know i will screw it up and get even more angry than modeling already makes me

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wish i had a damn extra plates to work with to make those metal spaced armor cheeks that made T-55s of that era sexy as hell, i could probably make my own but i know i will screw it up and get even more angry than modeling already makes me

"Evergreen" is your friend in that regard.

http://www.evergreenscalemodels.com/

 

Lots of neat structural sections.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Crossposting my GIGASTALIN from SA

 
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At 1:30, it's the largest tank I own, noticeably bigger than its 1:35th IS-2 cousin or even the slightly fatter 1:32nd Sherman and Lee.
 
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Unlike Tamiya's old motorized kits, this one very obviously was meant to have a motor when looking from the outside. The openings to the final drive (which for some reason was placed outside the hull) are visible, as are the gears on the drive sprockets. There was also some kind of opening in the rear, but I patched that up with some spare plastic. These holes I only noticed after I glued on the hull, too late to fill them in. You can also see the weird rubber tracks in this image that have these weird hemisphere bumps on them instead of the track teeth.
 
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For some strange reason, the sprues were connected into one inside the box. They separated easily (the old plastic snapped without much resistance), but this brittleness was rather unfortunate, as there were very large cracks running through the lower and upper hull halves. 
 
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Even though the kit was made by a toy company, it manages to be more accurate than the Airfix kit, barring some curious design choices like the aforementioned suspension problems, lack of AA machinegun, a pickaxe as the only available pioneer tool, lack of travel lock, and the kind of weird muzzle brake. Overall, it's a fairly simple kit. There is no interior, even though, with some work, you could make the hatches movable. My kit didn't come with any decals, but looking at the weird star on the box, I can safely assume it was for the best.
 
Amusingly enough, the short description in the two-page manual describes the tank has having 120 mm of armour and being a major contributor to the defeat of the fascists, which makes it pretty obvious that they were thinking of the IS-2 when making this kit and built a passable IS-3 entirely by accident. This theory is reinforced by the very approximate T-34-85 that the company also makes.
 
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  • 2 months later...

A new addition to my French family.

 

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This is a Heller Somua S35, and it follows the Heller formula to a T: rubber tracks, movable turret hatch, primitive gun breech, two of the same crew figures they stuff into every box. I can't comment on the decals since my kit didn't come with any. This kit has a few features that the Hotchkiss and Renault next to it didn't, namely a freely rotating turret machinegun (without a breech at all) and a rotating commander's cupola. There are also plenty of suspension details underneath the skirts. I swear I took a photo of them, but I can't seem to find it. 
 
I had a bit of trouble getting the upper and lower halves of the hull to line up properly, but other than that it's a decent kit. It's not going to blow your mind, but it's a good way to spend twenty to thirty bucks. Plus, it gave me an excuse to paint some ridiculous French camo!
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  • 4 weeks later...

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