Hello everybody,
Recently I finished building the KITECH 1/48 LAV-AT.
Here's what it looks like:
About the real thing: The LAV-25 8x8 wheeled system was designed and produced by General Motors of Canada (which went on to become General Dynamics Land Systems) to meet a requirement of the United States Marine Corps. The LAV-25 itself is based on the Swiss MOWAG Piranha 8x8 series of armored vehicles. The MOWAG company is also owned by GDLS of Canada. The LAV has a basic variant with a 25mm chain-gun turret, and also a mortar carrier, air-defence variant, logistic variant, recovery variant and also the anti-tank variant with Emerson TOW turret.
I bought the kit for under 10$ in Poland. It is actually ment as a toy, with motor drive. Well I built it with motor installed and the whole thing was a kind of escape from more complicated projects. I also wanted to practice new techniques. What we get in the box are two sprues with parts made of sand-coloured plastic, bag of parts to build the drive, eight rubber tires, a little decal sheet and an instruction. The first sprue contains parts for the undercarriage. Well it looks like the cool chinese planned it well and they use the same sprue for all their 8 wheel armoured cars (LAV-AT, LAV-25, BTR-80 and BTR-80 air defence). You see it has no chance to work. The supplied wheels are accordingly bad:
I substituted my own, scratchbuilt/modified from toy cars. The other sprue has parts for the upper hull and the TOW launcher. Well it's bad, too, but better than the first one. The instruction sheet and the second sprue show some family resemblance to the Italeri 1/35 LAV series. The upper hull is a hybrid between LAV-25 and LAV-AT, scaled down to... about 1/41 scale. Yeah, I know the box says 1/48. I calculated the dimensions and it comes out at about 1/41. The upper hull has it's problems too. While the detail is not bad, the kit is seriosly missing parts - most notably the commander's cupola. That deficit is even pictured in the box art! You see in the italeri kit the cupola is glued right on top of a hull which doesn't even have an opening in that place. In the KITECH offering it also doesn't have the opening, neither has it the cupola. I scratchbuilt one for myself:
The second major problem, and one I didn't fix is the fact, that the model TOW turret is installed in the centerline of the vehicle, when it shold be offset to the left. The fix wouldn't be to tough, as the top armor plate comes as a separate part but I noticed it too late. There are also other minor problems, mainly missing parts/details and inaccuracies looking like the model
had problems to decide if it wnts to be a -25 or an -AT. So there you have it - with lots of mods and scratchbuilding You can get pretty accurate top portion of an 1/41 LAV-AT... I guess nobody gonna try it - at least I warned you. I had fun with it and a good opportunity to practice painting and try some new tecniques. If you don't know the LAV family could even say it doesn't look so bad. What do you think? Looking forward to Your comments and have a nice day
Pawel