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The Kit |
The kit is a reissue of the approximately 15 years old ESCI kit. The only difference is in 4 holes on the turret roof, needed for positioning parts, which have been closed. The plastic is light olive and brittle, with thick attachments to the
sprue. The plastic does react very slowly with Italeri’s liquid glue, but works fine with Revell’s liquid glue.
All the following comments are also valid for Revell’s M60A3, which uses the same tooling ( the old ESCI kit ) as base.
Many parts suffer from “flesh” and heavy seams. The gun and Commanders MG are not moveable. Very positive are the delicate surface structure and serial numbers, so typical for US vehicles—even if not all have been reproduced.
An accurate wire mesh for the turret basket has been provided. The drivers hatch is
molded on the upper hull. So any open drivers hatch needs surgical preparation.
Apart from that, the overall impression is a good one, and I calculated 3 evenings for construction.
First obstacles appeared when I glued together larger parts like hull, turret, commanders copula-the fit
was very mediocre and I had to fill and sand a lot. The problems continued the more construction proceeded. While some missing details could be completed with Evergreen profiles and rivets punched from plastic sheet with a Grainer’s set, others
were really nasty to overcome.
The whole list of shortcomings is approximately 1,5 pages long, but here I only want to highlight a few:
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The lower hull shows 2 vertical gaps on each side, which do not make any sense and therefore have to be filled with
plastic.
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The rear light consists of 2 lenses-an oval and a rectangular one. In the kit one light was represented correctly, the other one shows 2 rectangular
lenses.
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The towing hook looks sort of strange. The reason is, that the 2 halves of the part were positioned incorrectly, as they are twisted in 180°. The only chance to correct this error is to cut the piece apart lengthwise and glue the 2 halves together again in correct position.
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Although the width of the fenders and the tracks is correct, the Revell tracks jut out the fenders for
about 2mm. I had to shorten the axles of the swing arms and some areas of the rear side of the bogies.
I also engraved the lower hull in the area of the return rollers, so that the track could snuggle in.
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On the rear of the swing arms there are the buffers missing which should touch the stoppers
to prevent the axle from over bending.
The Revell tracks suffer from some lack of detail as the end connectors pinholes are
missing. I created those by using a soldering tool. To fit the tracks to the tank I removed 7 links. |
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