Revell-Germany Katyusha

I've been working on Revell-Germany's 1/35th scale Katyusha multiple rocket launcher lately, gluing it together while watching the Olympics on TV. I think it's a reissue of an older kit by someone else - Italeri, maybe - but I don't know that for certain. All I know is that it's hard. The engineering of the chassis and drivetrain is particularly difficult. Who asked for two-piece working universal joints? I certainly didn't, and wouldn't have wanted so many of them if I had asked! It looks okay once it's together, but putting it together takes some doing. The front wheel and tire assemblies are okay, but the duals are tricky; the outer and most visible part of the rims have four gates that are difficult to clean up because of their locations. I like the idea of the black vinyl tires, which seems to argue that painting will be simplified, but there's no way to fit the tires onto the completed rims, so I assembled them entirely and painted them as a unit and will repaint the tires by hand later.

It doesn't help that the styrene in the kit is kind of rubbery and strangely tough. I found it hard to shave cleanly with a knife, yet all too easy to tear. The two-part cab is hard to assemble cleanly and I had to resort to putty and sanding to get rid of the major seam where the roof fits onto the rear wall parts.

But it's coming together. I just came inside from painting, where I sprayed the completed chassis with hardware store flat black paint and the cab and rocket launcher subassemblies with Tamiya RAF green lacquer. Now I just have to finish assembling the sight unit and launcher pivot tube, and paint the tires and cab interior details. Oh, and install the steering wheel, which can't be installed until after the cab and chassis are glued together.

I don't think I'd characterize this kit as a lot of fun to build, but how many Katyusha models do you see?

Aeroplast 1/35th BM-8-24 Rocket Launcher

The Soviets, among others, made heavy use of rocket artillery in World War Two because rocket systems were generally simple, light, mobile, and offered enormous firepower in the opening salvo. Rocket artillery has certain disadvantages like long reload time, highly conspicuous smoke trails, and relative inaccuracy, but as a shock weapon in breakthrough battles rocket artillery can be pretty devastating. Most Soviet rocket artillery took the form of the truck-mounted Katyusha, but here's a piece of pocket artillery in the form of 24 launch rails for 82mm rockets mounted on the chassis of a T-60 light tank.

The Aeroplast kit comes molded in medium-soft dark grey styrene. The kit includes the normal sprues for a T-60 light tank supplemented with two sprues for the BM-8-24 version. Both solid and spoked road wheels are provided; I used the spoked versions because I liked how they looked. The tracks are link-and-length, not normally my favorite things, and as usual the teeth in the drive sprockets didn't fit though the holes in the tracks.

The kit is reasonably well detailed. It isn't on the level of a Dragon or late Tamiya kit, but it isn't bad. The rockets are a little chunky and the stabilization fins in particular are thick, but if you squint it isn't too noticeable. The worst part of the kit are the instructions. They cover the assembly of the basic chassis well enough, but when you get to the launch rail assembly, the instructions turn maddeningly vague. In the end I worked out the assembly sequence on my own because I couldn't make heads or tails of the cramped, overly-busy drawing Aeroplast supplied. An annoyance is how the elevation links for the launch rails limits you to the maximum elevation shown in the photograph. Someday I'm going to cut out the short link so the rails can be elevated higher, but not today.

I painted mine Krylon olive drab and sprayed the undercarriage with medium-brown acrylic paint with a toothbrush so I could reasonably claim that the vehicle had driven through fresh mud and thus didn't need to have its tracks painted. It could probably use a bit more brown sprayed on the undercarriage, but it isn't bad. Otherwise, there isn't much to finishing the vehicle: a little scrubbing with some pastels, a little pencil lead rubbed on the launch rails, and Bob's your uncle. The instructions do not specify a color scheme for the rockets so I hunted around on the Internet and found a picture of a Soviet rocket launcher with silver rocket tubes and black fin and nozzle assemblies. I went with the photograph even though my hunch is that the rockets probably should have been Russian armor green as well.

All in all, it's a nice small kit (almost 1/72nd scale in size) of an unusual subject. The rocket rails aren't easy to assemble and I don't like link and length tracks, but other than that, it went together fairly nicely and it adds some much-needed novelty to my shelf.

Tamiya 1/35th T72M1

Tamiya's 1/35th scale T72 and Dragon (or DML, I don't remember) Soviet tank crew and motor-rifle infantry. Sharp-eyed viewers will note the presence of the "Dazzler" countermeasure on the turret, normally a feature of T72s in Iraqi service. But this tank is in Russian service! What gives?! What gives is that I thought it was cool and I put it on my Russian T72.

This is a nice kit, enough of a multi-media thing to give one a mild thrill of excitement, but not so much that it starts to feel like building a brass locomotive. I really like Dragon/DML figure sets too, though I have a sneaking suspicion that I like the Don Greer cover paintings more than I like the figures themselves (though to be honest, they are nice figures).

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.