PST 1/72nd IS2m Stalin

The burly-looking IS2 heavy tank was the Red Army's answer to German heavy tanks like the Panther and Tiger. Its lack of refinement made it an uncomfortable vehicle to crew, and the split ammunition for its 122mm main gun reduced its rate of fire, greatly accelerated crew fatigue, and reduced its ammunition load to only about 25 rounds. But for all that, it was well-armored, fairly mobile by heavy tank standards, and could stand and trade shots with the best the Germans had.

The kit comes with a lot of extra parts, but I have no idea what they're for, as the instructions are entirely in Russian. Once you get past obvious Russian words like "pectopah" and "het", I'm pretty much at sea, but my hunch is that the kit includes two upper hulls, one for the IS2 and one for the IS2m with its revised armor layout, and guns and mantlets for the IS1 (85mm main gun), IS2 and IS2m (122mm main gun).

Building the kit was not without problems. The road wheels are very delicate, and the sprue connections are very beefy, so getting the road wheels off the runners without ruining the steel rims requires care and deliberation. The upper and lower turret halves met with a substantial step, but instead of sanding or scraping the step, I attacked it with a stiff brush and lots of MEK, which made it look more like a weld seam than a step (and highlighted the turret's heavy cast texture to boot). The turret grab irons were afflicted with heavy parting lines and the plastic was brittle, so I replaced them with thin Evergreen styrene rod bent with round-nosed pliers and inserted into holes drilled in the turret. The unditching beam at the rear was a featureless cylinder, so I roughed it up by dragging a razor saw over it until it started to look a bit more like a genuine log. Some of the smaller parts are hard to identify - the saw in particular was difficult to identify, but other small parts were pretty good - the DshK machine gun was quite nice, I thought.

The kit uses link-and-length tracks. I don't like link-and-length tracks in general, and this kit did nothing to change my mind. The track links have desperately tiny attachment points and they are very easy to break. I made the tracks in upper and lower halves so I could remove them for painting, but during drybrushing I broke them into eight or ten or twelve pieces each. Time for the super glue, boys. Somehow in all this breaking and re-gluing one track ended up a half a link too short, and the other a half a link too long. To make this even more fun, the teeth in the drive sprockets don't fit through the tracks, so they had to be trimmed off.

The kit also has strange plastic. It has a definite grain and likes to split or tear like wood, not plastic, and that makes freeing the small parts even more fun.

I painted it overall green and added a lot of drybrushing and a liberal coat of dust (actual genuine dust), and hand-painted the markings, which are limited to a white recognition band around the turret and simple tactical numbers. I found a vinyl figure in my junk box - I think a Russian Spetsnaz guy from an old Esci (or Italeri, I don't remember) "modern infantry" set. I carved off the brim of his bush hat and built up a padded Russian tanker helmet out of epoxy putty, and mounted him in the turret so he's barely peering over the rim of the commander's cupola.

All in all, I found this kit difficult to build. The plethora of small parts, the huge gates, and the strange grainy plastic take some work to overcome, and the link-and-length tracks just never worked for me. And at $16.00 it's a bit pricy for 1/72nd scale. But on the other hand, it turns into a nicely detailed model that captures the brutish, ominous lines of the original. Recommended if you're interested in Red Army armor of the Great Patriotic War, but the kit requires a certain amount of patience.