Academy Models has bought together one of the better American Tank Destroyers and here Kevin Brant takes a look in the box.

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Thanks!

That MG belt - I want this kit.

Interesting subject.

A useful kit, if the price is right! I can name pretty much all the kits that donated sprues to this model, so there's nothing actually new here, but aside from some minor defects (turret is too short front-to-back) it could be built into a decent TD with some TLC.

Note that the appearance of our friend "Sammy Sinkhole" isn't a sign of tooling age, but is instead a sign of poor QC when running the injection moulding machines! Thick parts retain heat, and are still soft when the injection pressure is cut off for ejection of the sprue from the mould, allowing the liquid plastic to "shrink" away and pull the surface in. A good operator would see this early on and adjust the timing by a fraction so the plastic cooled enough to stay rigid before the parts got ejected from the machine. Not that any of this helps once you have a box of sink-holed parts on your workbench...

Thank you for good review. Expressly, I don't know exactly about this kit yet. But the recently released T-34/85 113 factory version kit is really terrible.

Sorry not 113 but 112 factory.

Why Academy still release such terrible kits? Because the main consumer of thier scale model kits are grammar school students in S.Korea. Actually said T-34/85 kit looks like motorized toy tank, simillar to Academy 1/48 scale toy T-34/85 kit!!!!

In defense of Academy, this occurrence is indemic to all injection plastic companies and not just them. Usually happens in the thicker sections of the bows of ship models. Dragon, Trumpeter, and Flyhawk (among others) have this to varying degrees.

True enough, more than one company suffers from it! (Italeri is downright FAMOUS for sinkholes...) But they are noticeably absent from Tamiya and Tasca parts.

Which is why those companies are exceptional with the quality of their moldings.


This is a huge improvement on the previous Italeri M36B1 and a worthwhile subject. Nice to see Academy mixing and matching sprues like Dragon has been doing all these years.

And it's funny that the sink mark in the track matches some track wear I've seen. Pitted rubber pads are not unknown.

i want. I like Academy kits.

This should help improve this kit. Voyager just announced it, unfortunately it looks like the barrel and resin tools are seperate. But should make the kit build a lot better with this.