Hello,

I like to start with WW1 AFV models, and like to know what brands are on the market to buy.

Best regards

Bahadur

Hi Bahadur,

RPM do a couple of Model T Fords.

Emhar do a range of British WW1 Tanks.

All are 1/35 scale in plastic and all fairly basic.

Quality wise I can't say never having built them.

Apart from that there are a few AM resin producers around but again I can't comment never having seen the kits. Resicast have a Model T Ambulance, and a 1914 Rolls Royce, which is a beautiful kit.

Roden do a Rolls Royce but I can't remember the dating of it.

Cheers

Al

I'm afraid that you're likely to be very disapointed, Uzay.

If you want to build injection molded 1/35 scale plastic kits, there are only about four kit makers that I can think of - Emhar, Tauro, RPM, and Roden.

1) Emhar - WWI British Tanks: The Losenge-shaped heavies and the Whippet light tank. Emhar produces a series of kits of these subjects.

Unfortunately, all of these Emhar kits are engineered like 1/35-sized 1/72 scale kits. The detail is horribly simplified and the tracks are great thick rubber-band types. There are also some accuracy and dimension issues. All in all, these are very poor kits.

2) Tauro - WWI German A7V Tank.

This kit is very old and somewhat hard to find now. It has some significant accuracy issues, but it does have a basic interior and separate link tracks. It needs a lot of work to be built accurately as each German A7V was essentially a uniquely configured vehicle (the configurations also changed over the service life of each tank). The Tauro kit is a compromise between all of these configurations and doesn't represent anyone of them particulary well.

3) RPM - French FT-17 Tank.

There are one or two crude injection molded kits of the FT-17 that are based on early, poor low-pressure kit designs. These kits are in the same quality / accuracy range as the Emhar kits. Hardly worth building unless you really want to do a lot of work. The original molds were cut by RPM (AFAIK) but have been re-boxed under other brand names too.

4) Roden - Makes a series of Rolls Royce Pattern British Armoured Car kits. I don't have any fist hand experience building one of these, but I have seen some very nice ones built up. I think the kits need a bit of work, but the basic "bones" are pretty good. There are lots of after-market accessories for these.

Because all of these kits are so poor, there is quite a lot of after-market accessories. You can get resin tracks for the Emhar tanks and such.

There are also several full-up resin kits of some WWI AFV subjects, but that's a different subject altogether.

There's a pretty lively discussion about the demand for "main stream" WWI kits, figures, and accessories over on the figures forum if you want to see just how poorly served armor-modelers are for these subjects.

Armor modelers are about due for one of the major injection kit makers to start producing newer, state of the art styrene models of WWI AFV subjects. The only question is which manufacturer will pick this low-hanging fruit first and steal a march on its competitors?

HTH,

Al and Mike,
Thanks a lot for the information. It might be a better idea to wait a bit more for WW1 AFV, I hope a major manufacturer start producing them. Nevertheless appreciate the feedbacks

Best Regards

U.Tarkan Barlas