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A Tale of Three Jeeps

Exterior Details

A note on the bumper: Both Bronco and Tamiya have this as one piece with the correct hole in the lower center. DML have most of the bumper molded onto the chassis with the front central part separate with no further details, in particular without the hole. This makes it harder to get a nicely aligned bumper and makes some cleanup necessary. I do wonder what the advantage of this approach is.

Other details added to the outside are the rear view mirror (I broke Tamiya’s due to more brittle plastic) and the camouflage lamp. The lamp has sink marks in both Tamiya and DML. Both DML and Bronco have a base and guard from PE. The Tamiya guard is made from plastic and fine enough that a replacement is not really necessary.

This basically concludes the basic Jeep build. All three kits make nice Jeeps, though Tamiya’s is certainly the easiest to build and Bronco’s is the most accurate and detailed.

Armament, Armor and Trailer

All three kits offer at least one way to arm your Jeep.

Tamiya: I decided to skip the .30 cal. from the kit as I’ve already got one of those in the cabinet as well as a basic Jeep. While rummaging through the spares box, I found a Skybow .50 cal M2 which I decided to add, together with the wire cutter.

DML: As mentioned in the review, the armored shield is not very accurate in that the frontal armor should be a separate part overlapping the sides and there should be a rounded cutout instead of the square one. Also, the rifle rack was moved from the windshield to the interior of the armor on the driver’s side; the kit includes no rifle rack.

I cut apart the DML PE armor and used the front portion as a rough template for my own wider version from plastic card. Then I made some holes and added the attachments from stretched sprue. I had a spare rifle rack from a Tamiya Jeep I built a long time ago. For the bazooka mount, the attachments in the kit are made of flat PE parts. The real thing however, looks more round. I replaced them with wire.

Bronco has lots of options when it comes to armament. There is a .50 cal mount and there are two different kinds of .30 cal mounts, one on the same mount as the .50 cal, the other mounted on the dashboard in front of the co-driver. I decided to use this dashboard mount, as I don’t think it was ever available in a plastic kit.

The Bronco kit also has a trailer. This builds fairly straightforward and is very well detailed. It even includes instructions to ad the break and electric lines from stretched sprue. Care has to be taken when assembling the individual side and floor parts to ensure that there are no gaps. The kit also includes a canvas cover for the trailer.