RGronovius

Our house is one of those 90s style houses with a formal living room. Since we're not formal living room type folks, it's become my "dad cave". I do some modeling and online gaming here.

This guy has one of the 1/35 FT-17 kits for sale. He's a pretty stand up guy and is well know on armor modeling sites for his photo gallery CD business. http://www.network54.com/Forum/409173/thread/1306216862/1-35+kit+list+updated+w-more+plastic%2C+PE%2C+and+resin.

Here's the Landships website link. Probably the best site for finding what WW1 armor is out there. http://www.landships.freeservers.com/

Rob, Thanks for the info on these models. Didn't know about them. Do you have any experience with them, if so how are their models as far as accuracy and quality? Thanks, Ron W. Tricky, fiddly builds, but I've seen them look pretty good when done. They are made like the actual vehicles; lots of flat pieces that you have to align. They also do an individual link track set that requires 4 pieces per link, but the included tracks are one piece vinyl. All the kits are virtually the same, just added pieces for whichever variant the box art calls for. Because of this, some kits have inaccuracies.

RPM does a fairly comprehensive line of FT-17 based kits. They also do several Model T armored cars and stuff like that. I know they do a Mack truck hauler of some type in 1/72 scale. I do not know if they had a 1/35 scale version. Many of the kits they did in 1/72 were repeated in 1/35.

Revell-Monogram must have changed then. I had the old Monogram TBF Avenger and the decals were ruined because I had spilled a coke on them a long time ago (pre-internet). I asked them for a replacement set after I had seen that they reissued the kit in the late 90s. They sent replacement decals right away.

There is a short history on the development of the Borax mule team kit in the book, Remembering Revell Model Kits, by Thomas Graham. Revell reps went out and took measurements and designed the kits, but Adams produced the molds and distributed the kits. Revell and Adams had a close relationship at the time with Adams developing many of the 1/40 armor kits for Revell.

This site has a scan of those instructions: My link

They were badly out of register. Plus Esci decals were never the best when new and these were around 20 yrs old.

Here are some of my builds. Among them is a Japanese Type 90 in a winter scheme, a US CCKW 63 fuel truck, an M113A1 in Bundeswehr ambulance markings during a REFORGER (I hated the decals but was stuck with them), a Jadgpanzer IV in my first attempt at a German winter scheme (the decals didn't like my technique), a M3 Stuart "Satan" flame tank and an M998 HMMWV that represented the one I had as a battalion maintenance officer for 3-32 Armor shortly after the end of Desert Storm. The Type 90 was a Fujimi kit (I think). The fuel truck is Hasegawa as is the Jagdpanzer. The M113A1 is an old Esci/AMT/Ertl kit and the decals were the worst. The M3 is the old Matchbox kit that was converted into the "Satan" flame tank. The HMMWV is the Revell kit.

The original P-38 kit by Monogram was a nightmare. It was one of those 4 in 1 kits. It built into a generic J or L fighter/bomber, M nightfighter, Droop Snoot pathfinder and an F-5A photo recon version. Lots of optional parts and movable hatches, panels etc. Monogram's Mustang was pretty good by comparison.

That was one of the common complaints about the Italeri 38t kits. All three (38t, Marder and Hetzer) used the same suspension sprues, but the experts knew there were size differences. Unless you can get the PE for next to nothing, pouring good money into a dated kit will end up with a dated kit costing as much as the newer, up-to-date kit. For the price of the Tamiya suspension sprues and the Eduard PE, you're closing in on the price of the decent Dragon kit that many guys sell to pay for the better Tamiya kit.

Maquette makes a set of 38t road wheels and single link track, but I do not think they are proper for a Hetzer. The Hetzer has a larger wheel diameter.

The 1996ish Dragon kit made the Italeri Hetzer obsolete. I remember a friend literally giving me his old Italeri kit after buying a DML one. I was stationed in Alabama at the time so I am guessing it was around 1996 or 97.

The Gamma Goat was like the Goer, looked good on paper but failures in the field. I think the Dodge 880-series and CUCVs were stop gap measures to replace the Goats and not a whole lot of them were produced.

The SCUD came out around 1992 or 93, shortly after the Gulf War and has been reissued a time or two since then. It is a challenging kit, or so I have read. I've seen builds of it that look beautiful. They must have been labors of love. Google Dragon Scud review and you should get some hits. The Tamiya HMMWV would depend on which kit you have. If it is the M242 Bushmaster kit, that is really a rebox of the Italeri kit (yes, Tamiya reboxed an Italeri kit in the late 80s and passed it off as their own) with a new sprue for the hard top and gun system. The vehicle was a "one of" and was never fielded. If you have a Tamiya M1025 or M1046, it is a newer HMMWV kit with no relation to the previous Bushmaster kit or anyother HMMWV kit. They are decent models and will depict a post Desert Storm to initial Iraqi Freedom invasion vehicle. The Tamiya M1A1 with mine plow is a decent, solid kit, but is dated and has been bypassed by more recent offerings. It's good for a Desert Storm thru mid 1990s tank.

I'll second PMMS for a couple of reasons. One is that Terry writes them himself with one set standard. You know what you're getting when you look at his reviews. Other sites may be more comprehensive in numbers, but the quality of the review is only as good as good as the reviewer. It may be the first review a person has written or the umpteenth. The review may be an out-of-box with or without photos or a comprehensive build that uses hundreds of dollars of aftermarket items set on a beautiful display base. Some sites hand out review items to the favored few. Again, the guy who raises his hand to get the free kit may or may not know anything about the subject matter. Give me an AFV Club Tiger kit and I'd probably give it rave reviews for the detail and surface texture, but a Tiger expert would tear it apart (and have done so). I use that as an example because a Tiger expert wasn't pleased with it and I thought it looked great and didn't care about any issues he had with it. It just looked like a cool kit to me so he gave it to me. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Some of the old school reviews with no photos are rather dated. Some sites have these old school reviews intermixed with more current styles, but you don't know what you get until you read the review or recognize the reviewer's byline. If I go to Perth, I know what I'll get. Although I do have to admit that an old school review without photos is better than no review at all. The downside to PMMS is that many of his sentences tend to run on. Something a second set of eyes (as in an editor or proofreader) could easily correct. Also his reviews are limited to his own personal knowledge base. Subjects he's more familiar with or has more comprehensive research material tend to be better than those he is not or does not have. The above comments mainly pertain to 1/35 scale armor model reviews.

Because of the physics, you can't make an Enterprise that can fly through the air or space realistically. It's not aerodynamic and gravity would work against it, so it won't fly in the air like an RC plane or helicopter. Doing it in space is not possible for your average RC modeler. You can, however, make it "fly" fairly realistically in water. NASA trains its astronauts in space walking underwater because of the similarities to operating in space.

I could be wrong, but i believe Tamiya has visited an Israeli armor piece before. One of the first modern tanks of theirs I ever built (along with the Abrams and Bradley).

I first bought AEF Designs conversions for the original Esci M1A1 when that was the only A1 available. What I received was broken and anything done to the resin copy of the Esci turret wasn't anything I couldn't have added to the actual turret with a couple pieces of sheet styrene. I tried a few IDF conversions a little later, for the old Tamiya M3A2 halftrack, and realized I was wasting money.

I like it, what's that blue visible thru the driver's view port?

RMS has just been bypassed by more efficient modeling forums. Take this forum, for instance, you can just read sci-fi, armor, aircraft, etc. On RMS, you have all topics in one long string of USENET posting, many of which are virtually unsearchable. Bad behavior here leads to removal of that person. Bad behavior on RMS leads to multiple participating members leaving the discussion group.

AZHoser, I remember that name. Of course there was also the infamous Dave Merriman, apparently a very good modeler and the only one there ever was. The rest of us lower life forms were "kit assemblers". If you didn't build it from toothpicks, balsa wood, scrap plastic and a dogbone then it wasn't a real model. You just assembled a kit. I have an annoyingly long memory and recognize many of the old trolls because they still use the same email address 15+ years later. Heck, I still use the first email address I ever got from way back in 1995 or 96.

Precisely why I haven't been to RMS in a number of years (and don't miss it). I don't even remember the issue now, but I was getting beat up about something, and I said screw it, see ya. Rob, as I recall you were one of the peacekeepers (or tried to be). Peacekeeping wasn't meant to be on RMS. It was an UNMODERATED NEWSGROUP and they wanted it to remain like that. Netiquette was in its infancy and the old school members like to hide behind the anonymity of the internet and act like jerks. Trolls and flame wars were the norm. Many a member left in frustration when they gave up on trying to make a troll see the errors of their ways. What they never realized is that the trolls knew what they were doing and their whole point in the pointless exercise was to get under someone's (anyone's) skin just to irritate them. The victims always seemed to think that they would be the ones to make the troll stop being a troll; that they would be the ones to get through to them. The only way to defeat the troll was to totally ignore them and add them to your "killfile" list. The killfile was a method that prevented a users posts from ever reaching your computer. Sort of like adding someone to your spam list. You would never see the troll's post on your computer. Unless, of course, the next victim replied to the troll and quoted the text in his response. And then the cycle would begin again. Once you leaned to ignore the trolls, RMS was a valuable source of information. Today I still recognize old RMS trolls by name on various modeling forums, but they seem to be better behaved on moderated forums. The internet has made the world a smaller place and the chance to run into one another at national and regional shows (and get a punch in the nose) has probably tempered their tongues.

And Cookie still posts his reviews in the decade plus old format. They have their uses, but the valuable ones are the reviews that have photos. Like the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.