Three previously announced kits are now slated for next month's release.

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Thanks!

mhhh...that Valentine looks good:-)

It's the Italeri crap kit reboxed by Tamiya. Don't bother

Jose,

Only the Crusader is an Italeri rebox, but :

1/ It wasn't a crap kit, actually it's pretty good.
2/ Tamiya offers corrected parts which make the kit even better.

Cheers,

Christophe

Pretty ironic coming from another vendor, wonder how he would feel is some posted that kind of comment about one of his products?

The Crusader kit is really a nice kit. I just finished one and bought two more to do all three marks. It's a new favorite kit.

I'd like to see if Tamiya added the exhausts too. Be nice if they reissued the Mark II which is very hard to track down these days.

And their Valentine will probably be cheaper than the AFV-Club one. Wonder if we'll see a great sell off of Miniart kits now?

Aren't the MiniArt Valentines already the better choice?

All the Miniart Valentines have some serious accuracy issues. Not much better than the Dragon kit compared to the more recent options.

Precisely which Italeri Valentine are you referring to? Funny as they have only done one in 72nd which is an ex ESCI kit. If you are referring to the Crusader it is far from "Crap" as you so quaintly expressed it. It was a very competent kit with a few niggles many of which appear to have been addressed by Tamiya in this release (Fenders). It won't be the exacting detail of a new DML PZ III but it will still be a very competent kit and still the only game in town. I'd love a new tamiya (or Bronco, AFV etc) releases of this but am happy with a tamiya makeover for now
Al

Please elaborate. I have been looking at adding one to my stash.

Here is a very good comparison of the AFVC/Miniart kits and what the latter got wrong with the Valentine.

I have a shelf full of Miniart kits. The rear hull has the wrong angles. There are a few variant details they missed when doing the five-six different marks they did. The AFV-club has the correct rear angles. Other than that it was a toss up for me and it ended up being a matter of price and I ended up getting the Miniart kits for half price or less.

Christophe,

Thanks! It isn't a bad kit and the corrected fenders make it the best (only?) game in town.

Thanks for posting that. Unfortunately, it looks as though the AFV Club kit is a one-off. Maybe the Tamiya will give modelers more choices. With MiniArt, it seems once an error is introduced to their designs, it spreads across all subsequent variants.

Very cool AFV kits!!!

The Crusader definitely sounds nice, it's my favorite British AFV.

I can see that nice Crusader in a Market Garden dio.

That Cruiser tank is one fine model, it plus a very nice Panzer 4 along with Tamiya's Hanomag (SdKfz 251 C riveted) were what got me started again in modeling. As far as kit quality, the Italeri kits were the best thing going, may I go far as saying that they were the best in the business. I hope they haven't retooled making it less of the former glory days of Italeri, except the soldiers that went with it were terrible. The cool thing about both the above mentioned Italeri kits (Pz4 included) was that they had working suspensions. A few years later I bought a Tamiya Pz4 and it was junk by comparison as it was meant to be a motorized toy. It did, however, have a gun breech that included the cartridge basket. That made it a must for open side doors back then.

The Cromwell was not in that battle, it was great for the desert but it was so under armored that it would have been a suicide vehicle. I can't remember if the Valentine was in NW Europe or not. I've seen a flood-flipped suspension, that is road wheels and tracks sticking out of the water, but it may have been one of the antitank guns that used the same suspension as the Valentine. That would be the one that the gun faced the rear.
Don't mess up a dio of an actual battle with a tank that would not have been there, unless you want to!