A build review of the other worldly looking Hitachi ASTACO NEO in 1/35th scale from Hasegawa. While not strictly a military model, it is a disaster relief vehicle and so will likely be seen with military vehicles during those events.

Link to Item

If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Very interesting piece of machinery to say the least.... Recently I saw someone on Facebook selling one these.

Stalinetz set looks good

This review is about the ASTACO, not the Stalinetz

haha. this topic shows up under ET model new PE sets

Two news stories got mixed up somehow...

Mario

I was about to say, these PE sets are already out for ET

I think I read somewhere JGSDF had ordered two of those
machines?

Thanks for the review.

Cheers,

Christophe

thanks for the info Christophe! On the Hitachi website it says that they won't sell them outside of Japan. Seems odd for non-military equipment but I guess it's their call.

For information in the public works series, Hasegawa Was out at first is mini excavator Kubota at 1/32.
this is a very functional model

It looks as though the Hasegawa kit is of an earlier version of the ASTACO Neo; watching the videos of the unit (all of which look like demonstration videos), the cutter arm is short a joint. In the model, the cutter arm is mounted on the turning body with a vertical pivot, allowing the arm to swing left and right; the videos and images online show the base of the cutter arm mounted on the end of a horizontal shaft, allowing the cutter arm to be rotated into a horizontal position, giving it more flexibility for working around obstacles. The base of that shaft is mounted on the vertical pivot. The arm itself appears to be the same, though.

It's still a fascinating design, and unique enough to stand out whether you build it straight up as civilian equipment or as a military engineer vehicle. The arm mount discrepancy makes me wonder whether we'll see Hasegawa release a second version of the kit with a small sprue containing the pieces for the newer arm mount.

Doing more digging, the version of the ASTACO NEO with the horizontal spindle on the left arm is indeed a newer design; the Hasegawa kit is the ZX135TF-3 that was exhibited at the 2015 Forestry and Environmental Machinery Exhibition at the Mondeusu Hida Mount Kurai Snow Park in October of last year, while the one with the additional rotation axis is the ZX135US-3 (with an operator's compartment redesign as well, from the pictures). An opportunity for someone with more skill than I have to scratch up the upgraded arm mount and controls if they felt they really needed the most up-to-date version.