Andrzej Snigorski reviews the StuG III Ausf F, one of the Cyber-Hobby Orange Box releases in 1/35.

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Thanks!

thanks for the review. wish they hadve used what parts they could have from their newest Stug G or PzIII kits.

I do believe that it would not be in their interest. Orange Box strategy seems to be placing two older kits in one box, add some extra, cheap stuff and sell it without influence on number of new kits sold.
They use old molds which probably have their value amortized. The biggest part of model's price is cost of evaluation of tooling - when this is already amortized production of each detail costs you only as much as operator's labour machines maintenance and raw material used (believe me, tooling may extremely expensive). Even selling Orang Boxes in much lowet price than standard DML kits it is pure profit for them.
Using parts from new kits would meen using parts from not amortized toolings - they would be much more expensive and Orange Box serie would not be as profitable for them as it is right now.
these divagations are not based on any info from DML or CH, these are just my thoughts based on observations on serial production as it is at my workplace

James ,thanks for posting this, and Tim, thanks for reading and for comments.

Andrzej

I've built this kit, it's not terrible once you get it together. Needs a fair bit of cleanup but fit is good for most things (aside from the PE exhaust shield, which seems to be too wide). The result looks pretty good and is an easy build, and the Magic Tracks are a nice addition. The figures had a lot of scar lines in the plastic however, they are going straight to the spares bin for surgery later.

A note - the kit requires approximately 93 links per side for the tracks. The manual says "x130" and the parts count claims "x72".

I'm planning on doing a SBS to show my shading/colour modulation techniques using this as the subject. Stay tuned!

Nice to see the kit available again--it was a very decent 1990's kit. The Magic Tracks are a big improvement on the "old school" link to link track in the original kits, but the on-vehicle tools are still pretty poor. Dragon decided not to throw in any of the Smart Kit tools from their Panzer III and IV kits, unfortunately, so an aftermarket set from Tamiya or Cyber Hobby will be needed, particularly to replace the jack, which has the mounting brackets molded as part of the body. One other change in this new release is the removal of nearly all the redundant parts. The original DML issue of the Sturmgeschutz III Ausf. F included all the parts needed to assemble an Ausf. C, D, or E as well, though this was not called out in the instructions. These parts are not on the sprues shown here, since Cyber Hobby is also offering a short gun Stug in its own box.

Nice review, Andrzej! How is the road wheels detailing? They seem a bit soft to me.

And the Dunkelgelb paint scheme for 1942 got me to scratching my head....

Thank you all for comments!




Wheels are bit soft, but not enough to be fun-killers, i.e. old Tamiya StuG had worse in my feeling. They may be more difficult to paint though...
Concerning '42 Dunkelgelb painting - I was surprised as well but I dug around and this is what I've found (from Panzewaffe.pl - my translation):
"It is common knowlage that Dunkelgelb base paint was introduced by Heeres Mitelungen No 181 instruction but in reality first Dunkelgelb factory-painted vehicles appeared at least in Spring of 1942. This instruction (dated 18 February 1943) introduced new camo scheme of green or brown stripes, dots and spots".
I do believe that before this instruction some vehicles prooved this camo to be working good, so it may be possible to have '42 vehicle in this painting as well.

Once again - thanks for comments!

A.

That's interesting about the paint. Seems the more I know about camo, the less I know. It's enough to make me give up painting them at all!

Another note:

The roadwheels don't fit onto the torsion shafts without some modification, I ended up drilling out the holes and cutting the shafts down several mm to make them fit. Odd that something so basic wouldn't fit, but it is easy to fix.