Hello everyone. Has anyone heard of issues with the length of the Takom Merkava Mk.1? A gentleman on FB posted pics of the upper hull compared to the tamiya and academy Merk 1's and it was also a full centimeter longer. when measured against known length it was 7mm too long. also the turret looked a bit longer as well. Thoughts?

Can you give the name of the FB group?

The Tamiya kit is based on a prototype, not a production sample. The Academ is based on the Tamiya.

Still waiting for my Takom kits, so I cannot say much at the moment, but it would seem odd for them to make such a dimensional mistake.

For the Merkava Mk.I most of the accepted references point out a hull length of 7.45 meters, which converted to 1:35th scale gives you a 21.285 centimeters length.
So, based on the photo of the model, Takom's hull is almost 6 millimeters longer than the correct scaled down size. Back to 1:1 scale this means a difference of 21 centimeters, quite noticeable.
So I have to say that yes, Takom drops the ball here, and it is fair to assume that this flaw would've been transferred to other parts of the kit just to make them "fit" to the kit's hull.
That said, each one will have his/her own opinions about if this is a fatal/huge/unforgivable error or not.

They might have gotten the right measurements, but that doesn't mean they applied them correctly to the model.

We've seen this happen many other times with other manufactures.

I can't say anything about hull lenght but what I see from these picture is the Tamiya quality moulding seems to be not so bad refeared to Takom. Since Tamiya Merkava is really cheap on the market, if Takom hull lenght is wrong, a nice idea may be to use Takom parts to improve the old Tamiya.

Do we know the points between which the published dimensions were taken? If not, the dimensions are surely of limited use in assessing the dimensional soundness of anything to which you compare them.

If they'd taken the overall length including rear baskets and translated that into hull length, that would work out at about 21cm.