Many modelers would often misunderstand that a model kit is just produced by a set of injection molds only. Concerning the Tamiya kits, I have many experiences (evidences) that they use more than one set of molds to produce the same kit. One example is the 1/35 Churchill Crocodile tank issued in 1977. I bought one which belonged to the first batch of production. I found two faults: the tank commander, the one holding war map with his right hand, appeared too short in 1/35 scale; the side plates had wrong pin position so that they could not be attached to the road wheel suspensions, by aligning the pins with holes on the suspensions. About one year later, I bought another box of the same kit. What makes me surprised is that the two faults were corrected. The tank commander grew bigger, looked good fit to 1/35. Also, some of the pins on the side plates were removed, and some of the holes on the suspensions were filled, so the remaining pins and holes can be aligned accurately. Today, the trace of these faults and corrections still remains in the kit.
Another example is the 1/25 tiger I kit. I bought two boxes in 1980’s. I compared the track links carefully. I found from the “alphabet” imprinted on the link back and the position of sprue cut-off, that the track links were produced by at least two different sets of mold.
So, I won’t doubt that, the Tamiya’s 1/25 chieftain tank would be produced by one or more set of mold from 1967 to 1980. However, three evidences can convince me to believe that the Toystar would be using the oldest mold tooled in 1967 to produce their chieftain kit. One evidence is that I bought one Tamiya’s 1/25 chieftain in the early 1970’s, two faults were found: the left side skirt and the right side skirt had different geometric shape near the frontal track cover; and some parts of the road wheel were punched through by the mold pin. Today the same faults were also found in the Toystar kit. The second evidence can be found from today Toystar kit is that: near the engine cover of the upper tank hull, you can find some cloud-like bas-relief. These are rust-etching effect engraved on the steel mold after cleaning with solvent. It means that the Toystar’s mold had not been used for a very long time (tens of years), got rusted, and then cleaned to be reused again. The third evidence from today Toystar’s kit is: the company stencil located on the underside of the tank hull was latched out. If the Toystar would make a copy of the Tamiya’s kit, it would be clumsy to imprint the company stencil on the part and then lathed them out. The possible explain is that Tamiya sold the oldest mold to Korean company many years, and the company stencil was latched out either by Tamiya beforehand or by Toystar aftermath.
If you are careful enough, you can found that the Toystar’s kit is not produced by the whole complete set of the oldest mold. One evidence is the lower part of the turret, it is produced by a new-tooled mold. This means that some of the mold for this original old kit was unusable or missed, and this probably explains why Tamiya sold them out and re-tooled new mold in current issue.
Why Tamiya spent such a lot of effort on resurrecting the classic 1/25 tank series? This is another story about the company philosophy, which needed to be continued…