1/35; Great Wall Hobbies
and according add on set by Great Wall Hobbies
Build up review/Work in Progress
Gentlemen-
About 6 weeks ago I got a hold of the latest release by the model makers from Shanghai.
The kit was duly reviewed here:
12,8cm Rheinmetall K44 L/55
Promising to be a nice kit right out of the box I still waited for the add-on set providing photo etched shields and a lathe turned barrel. The set finally arrived last week. Having a free week, I started the build on Monday and have invested 22 hours by now (including taking photos).
Sticking to the instruction I started with the mounting, which was straight forward. Minimal clean up was required. I want to draw your attention to two points, however:
The button holding the turntable from the inside of the mounting doesn’t even require glue to stay in place, however the stub on the bottom of the turntable needs shortening to prevent the tuntable from being instable. Furthermore there are two ejector marks on the bottom plate of the mounting that will be visible, while the gun is shown in the deployed setup, if not cleaned up. So please mind the two injector marks on the two short arms of the mounting cross bottom plate, i.e. the ones that can be folded.
On to the ext step I started the detachable travelling bogie. Again there were no pitfalls to be found. There are a few miniscule sink marks on the swing arms, but I found them to be small enough to ignore them. Remarkable is the use of two large metal springs inside of the suspension and the nickel plated lead wire to represent the break lines. Only on second inspection I found that the lead wire is indeed a tube! Still I wasn’t able to widen it enough to attach it to the fitting stubs, so superglue did the job when attaching them. To fit the steel wheels properly into place the axle pins need to be shortened a bit to prevent them from wobbling about.
Keeping true to the assembly instruction I continued to prepare sub assemblies for the main carriage.
The fit of the parts is exemplary, so the building went on in a race continuing to build block, lock and cradle, while the glue on former subassemblies dried.
On the block are three sink marks that are very shallow, however I still decided to fill them with putty impeding a speedy build of this subassembly. Inside the cradle are two recuperators, which you can hardly see. There was a line to be filled between the two cradle parts right beneath the gun lock. Looking a bit awkward at fist it turned out to be fixed easily with a cut-to-size sanding pad.
While the putty on the block was drying, I started various subassemblies for the mounting, such as the gunner’s seat, sight, training equipment, and the balance of the wheels required for the build.
The equilibrator cylinders were a bit of a pain to make, when trying to make them movable to be able to elevate the gun. It worked out OK in the end, but it took some blood, sweat and tears. Patience is of the essence as are good tools. The much easier way is -of cause- to give up on gun elevation and just use the equilibrator cylinders in the lowered position.
Even though I had the add-on set in hand I did assemble the gun shields and the barrel as provided in the kit.
The shields went together like a dream and they are really very thin. When building the PE shields I recommend NOT to stick to the instruction. I found it almost impossible to assemble the double shield without damaging them, in the way it is show there. The easier way was to fold the inner shield first and then attach the spacing stubs only to the sides and to the outer row on the glacier plate. Then I attached the outer shield with the inner row of stubs glued in place. Now I folded the front plate back and the subs went into place without any trouble. Then I ran some super glue along the open seam and held them in place for a few seconds: Done!
Of cause I’ll be using the PE shields, but I honestly think that I would have been quite happy with what the kit supplied in plastic.
Now the real deal is the gun barrel in the add-on kit. The plastic parts in the kit are nice and will serve those very well, who don’t want to spend the extra buck. However the assembly and clean up to hide the seams seemed to take forever. The assembly of the lathe turned barrel on the other hand took but all of 30 seconds, with no seams to clean up of cause. I am certain that after priming and painting the differences will be even more obvious.
Until here the kit was all it promised to be. I am having a lot of fun with the build. It has a bit of a challenge or two installed for you, but nothing that an average modeller couldn’t overcome. A bit of care should be taken when reading the instructions: sometimes the hold a riddle, but they are mostly easy to solve when looking at the parts properly.
This isn’t a shake’n’bake kit: The parts count is surprisingly high and to get a best result you need to clean up the parts, use glue sparingly, dry fit continuously and read the instruction carefully, as in EVERY other kit. However, there is NOTHING bad or misshapen about it (so far). I have seen far worse in most recent releases from other Chinese makers.
I am now heading towards putting the sub-assemblies into bigger units, while I am already striving towards the finish of the build.
Not bad! Not bad at al!
I hope you like the review and WIP. I welcome comments and questions!
Cheers,
Guido
