Matthew Lenton looks inside the box of Hobby Boss’s welcome reintroduction of another former Tristar kit.

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Thanks!

I built this one once.. and that was enough!

Tempting...

OK, it seems like I'm completely out of the loop, but Tristar has folded? It's a horrible "/news". I quite liked their kits when I was still building 1/35. (I've been out of touch what the 1/35 crowd does since 2009) I might even get this one for sentimental reasons...

How does this compare to the Dragon kit? The price difference is negligeable and I can deal with poor instructions. To be honest, I don't even need the Dragon instructions.

On the review text the author mentions that he couldn’t find any photos that showed the extra front armor "strip (K1)". In the Book Barbarossa Stowage on page 90 there is an Ausf.C with from the 12th Panzer division that has the extra armor.

If the comparison review of the Dragon and Tristar ausf.D is any indication the Tristar/Hobbyboss might have edge in accuracy. http://perthmilitarymodelling.com/reviews/vehicles/misc/pz4d/pz4d.htm

Matt, thanks for this - so is this the photo of the Ausf C about to be towed across some water on a raft towed by a halftrack? It seems that this page (90/91 spread) is visible in the preview offered on the "barbaross4stuff" blog site. Slightly obscure on the preview, but I can see that it forms a kind of lip over the front plate, presume the track links would normally sit under it, the caption says something about them being placed on the top while the rafting / towing is being done.

Great looking book, but leads me back to the frustrating thing I found while doing this review, which is that the two seemingly most comprehensive accounts of PzIV development, Panzer Tracts no.4 and Achtung Panzer no.3 are both out of print.

Yes, the PMMS comparison review is interesting (so detailed...) he mentions in his Ausf C review that Thomas Jentz was involved with Tristar's creation of these kits, which partly means it figures that it fits in with the Panzer Tracts source which I guess was largely written and researched by him, and his continual stress on reliance original source material gives confidence that it is accurate. I should perhaps say that I read the review of this kit on PMMS and then made a conscious decision not to refer back to it again while in the process of writing my own effort.

That particular review indicates that Dragon is more accurate.

I read Tristar is more accurate in that review:

"If you strip away all the eye candy, the minor errors and additional optional parts from the Dragon kit and look at the basic dimensions against those of the Tristar kit we clearly see that the Tristar kit is the fundamentally more accurate of the two...."