Okay, I'll wade into this one too. I love Tamiya, I love Dragon. Dragon is definately the better buy. I've had some fit problems with virtually every Dragon kit I've done. from pretty minor to pretty bad, but nothing insurmountable. Their big short comming is their instructions. They often have misnumbered parts, missing steps, misleading diagrams, or flat out mistakes. Most of the time, these can be worked through fairly easily by being aware, examining the diagrams carefully and matching them to the parts, dry fitting several times, and reading at review builds. As said above, most of their newer kits have color pictures rather than line drawings. But some of the very newest (i.e. the Pz IB series) have gone back to the line drawings. People either love or hate the picture variety. I have mixed feelings. I think they are okay for the most part, but could ocassionally benefit from some line drawings for clarification.
Most of the time, their indy tracks aren't too bad a build. Here the big problems are cleaning up the sprue attachment points and the ejector pin marks. However, the Sherman tracks I've found to be extremely hard to do.
Their customer support is outstanding. Check out the other post I have about that. (Dragon Support, WOW!).
Good luck and welcome to the dark side.
Bill
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DML M4A2 Red Army
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-- There is a fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness". (Author unknown)