Well, I guess I am officially adding the first images to this group build! So I jumped the gun a little bit.
![Smile [:)]](/FSM/CS/emoticons/icon_smile.gif)
This was a quickie project for the heck of it, in between steps on my Panther. It's a 1/72nd scale Russian D-1 howitzer, apparently first used in 1943 and subsequently finding its way into the arsenals of virtually all countries armed by the Soviets, including the NVA and the Iraqis. The prime mover is a bizarre Russian halftrack called the ZIS-42, which is basically a Ford Model AA truck with treads in the back. It was a failure and did not continue in production after the war, though several thousands were made and some were converted to fire engines (!) after the war.
I built the gun, mostly over the weekend. Here are some random observations on the kit.
This is a kit made in Belarus by a company called PST, and it has lots of flat surfaces, presumably to keep the cost of the molds down.
Ejector pins ejectors pins ejector pins! Their calling cards are everywhere on this kit, and after I while I started to adopt a devil-may-care attitude about their presence.
This is one of those kits that has lots of tiny skinny pieces attached to huge tree-trunk sprues. As a result, many of the smaller pieces broke despite best efforts to keep them together. Thankfully many of these broken parts lay atop other larger parts, so I was able to piece them together like a puzzle by attaching them stage by stage to the larger piece they lay on.
The plastic was partly responsible too. is an odd combination of brittle and soft, and looks like it may be radioactive, or possibly made out of Ivory Spring soap!
That said, it's an interesting subject, and it looks pretty neat when its all together. Here are some pics. I'm going to prime it black, glue the two gun sections together, paint the gun and the wheels, painting the tires separately, and then attach the tires to the wheels and then the wheels to the gun. The tires are styrene, BTW, not rubber, but are still separate.
Fiddly fun -- not the weekend project I had hoped for, but still! The tractor has fewer slender pieces but it requires lots of piece alteration to the basic kit and some added wire and so on. I'll turn to that next.
