Hi, I just want to let you know that tamya s rubber tires of their last humvee oif kits really suck !

It s now a bit over a year that my tamya humvee 2003 are built , and what do i see now ?
The rubber tires look all like if someone damaged them with a cutter . One rubber tire is even in half.

If I had known this before I had bought some resin tires.

It happend to me with the BTR Afghanistan of DRagon, it was a mess with those tires too, they all turned in two pieces .

I made a break with modeling and now wanted to go on with the oif diorama, and it s just now that I saw what happend with the hummer tires, so don t even know what day they got those cut wounds

I don t trust any rubber tires. And I sitll have a bunch of those last oif tamya humvees to build and a couple old academy hummers rubber tires included.

I have had no problems with rubber tires. It may be in the way you are finishing them. I have had some that have been on the models for 6+ years without problems. The key is to paint the rims so that the rubber is not touching bare plastic, and also to seal the tires with a good coat of dullcote. This keepa they soft and they don't dry out and crack. Works for me.

I've had some rubber tires on some cars I built almost 20 years ago and they are fine. Some havae been dullcoated some haven't. I wish every military model that had wheels on the original vehicle had rubber tires in the kit.

I had the same problem with mine. I built it about a year and a half ago. About six months after I finished building it, I noticed that the tires had started to crack a bit. Now they are a mess. I attributed it to the dullcote I used on the model, but maybe it is just poor quality rubber.

Hmmm - this doesn't sound good. Did you paint your tires' rims too or is the rubber splitting somewhere other than at the rims?

Gunnie

Yea, it is weird that I've had that problem, too but not on all the rubber tires. I don't know if this is true or not but ones that I used acrylic dull coat are fine and ones painted with enamel coat cracked. I am just thinking it may even have something to do with light exposure and humidity as well. My trumpeter Abrams model started to crack, too after about 3 years because it was made of more flexible rubber like plastic- like ones used in soda bottles. I couldn't figure out why. Anymore answers, anybody?

It may not be anything to do with paint or whatever, as I have had unpainted tyres on unpainted rims split. Might be something to do with the way the tyres are moulded with only one mould gate, my tyres seemed to split at a point opposite the gate.

I superglued them back together and that seems to work okay.

I had this happen with a Porsche 959 rally car and the Dragon BTR/BRDM kits. I've read and heard of this happening to a number of rubber tires but I don't recall there ever having been a complete explanation for the phenomenon.