It has been about 6 years since I last contributed to these forums. Work and family life consumed much of the time but now the children have graduated from college and my retirement at the beginning of this year opened time for me to re-introduce myself to modeling. Rather than jumping in at the deep end, I decided to start with a relatively simple kit, the Academy PzIII J (13531).
This is a newly tooled kit, relatively low parts count and few PE parts. Perfect to get my feet wet again. Next up was something in the same vein but more complex, a PzIII N by Dragon.
This was a more complex build with more PE and a higher parts count, nicely illustrating Dragon’s engineering philosophy of why design an assembly in 5 parts when it can be done with 20. Still, all went reasonably well. My initial plan was to follow this up with the Rye Field PzIII with a complete interior but in looking at RFM kits I came across this:
What an interesting subject; never knew that such a vehicle existed. I will admit though that the first image that I thought of after looking at the box art was one of Spiderman’s arch villians. This guy:
This will be another step up in complexity; parts count is north of 1100 if I recall correctly and some PE work required, which never was my forte. Essentially, it will be built out-of-the-box with only a few improvements added. The instructions call for assembling the kit in 3 stages; first, the turret containing the MICLICs, second, the hull which follows very closely to other RFM Abrams kits (in fact, about half of the sprues in the M1150 kit come directly from other RFM M1 kits), and last, assembling the mine plow which looks to be the most intricate part of the build.
Even the first stage can be divided into 2 sections. It starts with the assembly of the front part of the turret which houses the tank commander’s position (although no interior parts are included). The reactive armor blocks and spaced armor are first constructed, then the Integrated Vision System that comprises an array of closed circuit TV cameras are added. The commanders hatch with its 50 cal gun is assembled next.
The smoke grenade dischargers were intricate assemblies and required placement of some very small support struts. Each comprised 14 separate parts including the smoke grenades (seems that RFM adheres to Dragon’s design philosophy). There was also a choice of plastic or PE for the racks behind the commander’s hatch. I folded the PE (successfully I might add) but didn’t really see any significant improvement over the plastic parts so I used the plastic.
Some early thoughts on RFM kits since this is my first go with one. The moldings seem to be very crisp and highly detailed. There are many very small parts that must be removed from the sprues and cleaned before assembly. More in the later stages of assembly than now. Sprue attachment points seem haphazard. Some large parts have very fine attachments and require little clean up after removal. Then there are small parts that have quite large attachments which will require more careful cleanup. I am also noticing that on a fair number of parts, sprue attachment span over on the mating surface so again, careful cleanup will be required to maintain optimal fit.
Next step is construction of the aft part of the turret and the MICLICs.