I went to make a donation to my local hobby shop today and saw 3 1/48 scale aromor kits by Academy. Have I been missing something? Has anyone seen one of these opened?
Should I expand my stash? One was a Merkava, I don't remember the other two. I could use some WW II era 1/48 stuff. Maybe Academy has some on the way.

AS far as I know Academy has 8 different 1/48th scale armor kit out. I have no idea what's in store for them nor how nice or not they are.
Also, Bandai and Frog are two other companies that have 1/48th kits.

You can find a group dedicated to 1/48 armour at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/quarterscalearmor/

They can give you advice on whats available, not only in plastic but also resin/white metal.

A good source for kits and figures is Quarter-kit.com

http://www.quarter-kit.com/

Also why not take a look at some that I've posted at the Armorama site at MSN


http://groups.msn.com/armorama/ukgeoffsmodels.msnw

I took a peek inside the box along with the armor guy at the hobby shop I frequent. They are the horrible Zhendefu (sp?) motorized kits. These kits have "borrowed" pictures of Tamiya kits and use a common hull to represent every tank in their line.

The Academy boxed kits at least have build ups of the actual kits on the box side. Take a close look at the box side of the various kits, the lower hulls are all the same with the same number of road wheels and exact same drive sprockets. They're not worth the $10 I paid for a few of them when they were Zhendefu.

BTW, I do have a 1/48 scale Academy M-12 GMC that is the Bandai kit. It is rather old and uses the Bandai box art and the sprues are labeled "Bandai".

Thanks for the responses guys. Rob, once again a member of this site has saved me money.

ukgeoff: Thank you for the links. I joined the group. You do excellent work. Are all the models in your gallery quarter scale?

Thanks again.

Charles:

Yes they all are. The armour is a mixture of the original Bandai and the Frog/Fuman reisues, while the soft-skins/artillery are white metal/resin kits.