HobbyBoss has released a test photo of his upcoming Soviet T-18 tank. This small tankrnwill surely attract all those interested in the evolution of the Soviet Armoured vehicles.

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Thanks!

Hobby Boss wins the innovation award again! No more wrestling with the 40 year old Moldova "kit that don't fit". Thank you!

Awesome news for World of Tanks fans... Now I'd be hoping for a BT-SV if possible...

great news

YES!!! I've been waiting a LOOOONG time to see a new T-18!

I started that old AER kit around the time my first daughter was born. I got frustrated and put it aside....my daughter is 14 now. I will most definitely get one of these...and finish it before she's 28.

Chris

Looks nice never seen one of these before reminds me of the ft 17 will look forward to this

This is a must have, just looks so cool.

Hi, ALL!! Agree with EVERYBODY! I'd like to see some PLASTIC kits of some of the lesser-known US Tanks of the 1920s,'30s, and early '40s. T1/T3 Christie tanks, US/British Mk.VIII "Liberty" Tank, Ford 3-ton Tank, M2-series Light Tanks, M2-series Medium Tanks, T2 and T4 Combat Cars (which were actually tracked "tanks"), and even the God-awful
Marmon-Herrington CTLS-4TAC Light Tank, a T14 Assault Tank, an "all-new state-of-the-art" M47, and ditto for an M46, just to name a few. Oh! And an "all-new" M8 75mm Howitzer Motor Carriage, and a Dodge WC-54 WWII Ambulance, plus ACCURATE CCKW-352 and CCKW-353 US 2 1/2-ton 6x6 Trucks, in both "hard" and "soft" cab versions. Both TAMIYA's and HOBBY BOSS' entries have issues...

Actually, the T-18 is basically an improved KS (Russkiy-Renault) which was a DIRECT-COPY of captured Renault FT-17s. The KS-series tanks were built at Krasnaya-Sormova, of later T-34 fame...

thanks for the information. That now explains the similarities. Cheers

I just picked one of these up at Military Models in Orange , CA USA. The kit is typical of Hobby Boss kits in the recent past, molded in the sand color plastic with very fine details. The parts look good on the spues. The tracks are molded in brown and are individual glue together links. There are no decals. There is a PE fret

This model is very very tiny. Does anyone know if any of the Fruil tracks will fit it?

Vintage Paul

They have got to STOP this new subject/ new release nonsense! Why can't the manufacturers just stick to putting out the same old kits that they were doing 2, 3, 5, even 10 years back? Who NEEDS any NEW stuff, anyway!

It does look cool, and yes, I suppose that, as it really was a derivative of the French FT-17, it would be a tiny kit of a very small vehicle. But NO, I don't know of any metal links that fit any of these FT-xx types. I am, however, pretty sure that there ARE some AM link sets in metal or resin somewhere...

Are the kit tracks somehow inadequate - looking? I have read elsewhere that they seemed OK - and they do look good in the test build pics.

Bob

PS: The guy in the turret had his many tasks cut out for him, didn't he!

I haven't cut any of them off the sprues. They do not look especially tiny and they do not look like the FT-17 links. They might be the same spacing but the shape looks different.

I like working with the metal tracks but this tank is so cute I may just have to try building it with the track links.

There is another Hobby Boss kit, one of the T-50 that doesn't seem to have any metal tracks available yet so it sits right at the top of the stack waiting for the metal tracks to be released or for me to work up the courage to try making the tracks out of the links.

Vintage Paul

I'll be bagging one or more of these.

This thing is so cute I couldn't resist jumping in and the build is now well along. I already have four other models on the workbench but this one did not want to wait its turn.

So far, the fit of the parts has been good, no issues at all. The construction sequence needed to be reordered to accommodate painting and those dreaded glue together individual linked tracks. The plan is to build the upper & lower hull assemblies separately, completely paint & weather them and only join them after the tracks are safely on. The aft end including the tail can then be added.

The instructions are somewhat breezy and due to a lack of clarity (and my lack of research) two brackets, part number D16 were glued on upside down. They should mount with the arms up like bird wings. Possibly this part is a limit for the driver's hatch but I do not know this for sure.

Vintage Paul

I have bought a lot of these Hobby Boss kits over the years but this is the first one I have actually started work on. Hobby Boss love photo etch, I do not. The other issues is the tracks - Hobby Boss uses the glue together individual link types that seem a real chore to build. So – the kits sit.

I bought this kit last Sunday and one evening this week had a dream about building it so it jumped to the head of the line. One week after this kit was purchased, it is well along to being finished. The pics below show where the project is now.

There are a number of PE bits on the fret. Some were so small I could hardly see them and could figure out no way to work with them. A triangular bit was not shown in the instructions and I have not figured out where it should go. My skills are basic as you can see.

The one big piece was needed for detail. This part really adds nothing to the kit that couldn't have been molded into the plastic easily enough. I can only guess that Hobby Boss regards these kits as a sort of limited run kit and decided to save money in the mold making process by resorting to PE parts. Hobby Boss brings us kits no other main stream manufacturer has attempted and I am grateful for them.

I bought a tool to help overcome my fear of Photo Etch. It is a rolling tool to help make curved bends and I used it once before to make the curved engine cover screen on a T-34. I had hopes that this T-18 rear plate would also go easily. It was not to be.

I worked this thing for a solid hour and then heated it to red hot to soften it again for a second session. Finally, I got the basic bend made and finished it by using the plastic part and one of the metal rods to roll the PE part into the final shape. The parts fit fine and all the holes lined up. Whew!

The second big issue is still to be solved. I had some thoughts of trying to drill the track links to take Fruil wire but do not think there is enough beef in the tiny links to allow this to happen. The next idea is to make a wooden buck kinda like the HobbyTrax tool that works so well for making the Magic Tracks. I'll start on this today by working up a paper master.

OK, enough palaver, here are some pics of this cute little tank:

Unfortunately using P.E for the bits you mentioned is basically unavoidable. You cannot do perforations like that as a injection piece without have to throw any sense of undercutting in the trash.

In retrospect, I wonder if the plastic part might have been better skeletonized to allow the PE bit to look like punched sheet metal. I have found just too little reference material to tell for sure what things should look like back there.

I feel that the detail in the plastic would have been achievable in a couple of ways. A three piece mold would have don it or breaking this single part into sections would also have done it. I'm not a molding engineer, I don't even play one on TV, I'm just a guy gassing about it.

The the PE bit is on I have to say that it looks good and I have gained a lot of experience struggling with PE which might have sharped my skills for the next HB kit . . .

I have found HB to be pretty reasonable in their PE usage compared to say, Trumpeter. This kit only has a single small fret with

1x part 1
8x part 2
1x part 3

Ten parts does not seem excessive, and even so I think you only need four of part 2.




And you won’t. The triangular piece is part PE3. There is a note at the bottom of the sprue layout (page 2), “Unused Parts: D2, D22, PE3”. So, in the end you only need five PE parts.




I think a better explanation is that the real part is a muffler heat shield made from sheet metal and a more expensive mold would not make a better part. They probably thought the PE work needed (forming to a curve and bending four tabs 90 degrees) was within the skill set of their target customer.

KL

You could be right Kurt, but I am still not convinced that the PE added anything to this kit that could not have been done in plastic.

Whatever the truth of it is, the area looks good once painted and the trauma is over. On to the tracks!