Salvador Dali's Tank

Salvador Dali was famous for, among other things, painting melted clocks, as in The Persistence of Memory. But it turns out I may have discovered evidence that he dabbled in 1/76th scale armor models too. To wit:

Oh, I can't blame this on Salvador; I did it all myself. This is the ancient Matchbox 1/76th scale Char B1, a French heavy tank from the early days of World War Two. The kit is from the era when Matchbox used to mold their kits in various colors - I think this one was dark green and dark brown. But it isn't the kit or the model that interest me, it's the way the model warped and deformed. Somehow, by some process I never figured out, it ended up spending a few weeks in the back of my pickup truck when we were moving from one house to another. Because of slow contractors, a lack of framers and general bad luck, the new house wasn't ready so we had to live in a hotel room for a month or two, and the poor Char B1 sat in the back of the truck the whole time. Whenever anyone here says "Hot enough for ya?" I always think about my poor Char B. Merde! That's hot!

But curiously, here's it's stablemate, the FT-17. Same kit, same conditions, but a different fate entirely. Other than the tracks, this is actually a pretty nice kit, and obviously it's more heat-resistant than its bigger brother. RPM in Poland makes a much better 1/72nd scale FT-17, but the parts count is daunting; 200 parts, give or take, in a model that isn't even half the size of a White Castle hamburger.

The FT-17 looks pretty anachronistic these days, but it's really the first tank in the modern sense of the word, with a fully-rotating turret on a tracked hull. The bigger British "rhomboid" tanks were probably better suited for the conditions that prevailed in the cratered moonscapes of World War One, but the TOG 1 showed the limits of that approach.

Tank Transporters

I went through a phase not so long ago where it seemed to me the ideal way to recover from brutal chemotherapy was to build lots and lots of small-scale tank transporters.

Academy 1/72nd scale "Dragon Wagon" carrying a Revell M4A1(76) medium tank. The transporter kit is much nicer than the tank kit.

Revell 1/76th scale M19 tank transporter carrying a Revell M7 Priest self-propelled howitzer. Both are re-releases of older Matchbox kits.

Airfix 1/76th scale Scammell tank transporter with a Revell (formerly Matchbox) A34 Comet aboard. I find the Airfix kit difficult to assemble, perhaps the single hardest Airfix kit I've personally encountered. There's a whole lot of brass rod and epoxy in the tractor's lower works, replacing spindly plastic Airfix axles that buckle under the load of a single Cheezit.

The hindquarters of the Trumpeter 1/72nd scale [insert ominous-sounding German nomenclature here]. Nice kit. The Revell Sturmgeschutz-IV is pretty basic and I for one think the muzzle brake is deformed, but it looks like a Stug, and I guess that's the main thing.

The full Trumpeter [harsh-sounding German words here] tank transporter. The engine was nice, so I left the side covers off.

Revell-Germany Tank Transporter

Here's a picture of my recently-completed 1/72nd Revell-Germany Faun tank transporter and Leopard 2A5, also by Revell-Germany. Nice kits, both of them, though I still don't like link-and-length tracks! This was painted almost entire with Tamiya paints - NATO Green lacquer out of a spray can overall, and red-brown and NATO black Tamiya acrylics. The grey tires are Delta Ceramcoat craft paint, a color called "charcoal".

In the background can be seen the old Revell PT-109 kit, in this case with the White Ensign Models 37mm AT gun barely visible on the foredeck. Behind it is the Airfix MTB, and to the left lies the stern of Revell-Germany's S-100 S-boat. I'm in the process of revising and expanding my shelving so I don't have to display armor models and torpedo boat models together, but that project isn't done yet.

But at least they're all the same scale!

Italeri 1/72nd M-20 Armored Car

Here is Italeri's 1/72nd scale M-20 armored car. It's an interesting thing. It includes the normal (and somewhat spindly) undercarriage shown here, and a more robust one-piece wheel-tire-suspension package probably intended for wargaming. The one-piece assembly wasn't actually too bad, at least from the side. I used the spindly undercarriage and had trouble getting all six tires to touch the ground, and I found that the microscopic attachment points were easily obliterated with MEK. I found it difficult to assemble, especially the suspension, and every time I look at it, I think the rear axles are too far apart. There's also a very significant gap between the upper hull and the sponson; I glued the jerry cans in place to cover the gap. The jerry cans come with a rack, but I elected to not fiddle with it, my eyesight and patience not being what they once were.

I airbrushed everyone Model Master faded olive drab, then hit the vehicle with a heavy wash of burnt umber. The jerry cans and backpacks are native faded olive drab, which shows the difference between the washed and unwashed areas. The tires were painted with acrylic charcoal, and then I drybrushed the thing with - of all things - my wife's Bare Essentials makeup. She got on some automatic refill program and there's Bare Essentials all over the house, so I borrowed the light skin tone and the brush and did the old swirl-tap-buff, and I was amazed at how well Bare Essentials adapted to armored vehicles. Note the straps on the backpacks and the cleats on the tires in particular; all the highlighting is Bare Essentials.

The decals were pretty good. I thought the large star-and-circle would be a problem, with it went down pretty well. All in all, somewhat troublesome to assemble and marred by handle-less jerry cans and that problem with the rear axles, but still fun.

Revell 1/72nd Challenger I

Revell-Germany's 1/72nd scale Challenger I MBT. I liked this kit, by and large. The fit was pretty decent and I thought it had nice engraving and pretty reasonable detail for the scale, though the mesh on the various turret "saddlebags" isn't really mesh and the smoke grenades aren't very convincing. But the FN-MAG machine gun is good, the detail of the thermal covering on the gun barrel is very good, and the various screens and vents on the engine deck responded nicely to drybrushing. The downside is that this kit came with link-and-length tracks, something I've never really liked, and there is no crew at all. I painted it per the instructions, with black camouflage over olivish green paint. I like the effect, though the turret has such a low profile it's tricky to paint.

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.