Hi

This tread is meant as a review of the Eastern Express PT-76 model as well as developing tread about my PT-76 project.



I will try to review the kit OOB and from the viewpoint of the average modeller. I have not yet reached the level of the expert modellers that often review new models. But I consider myself as an average modeller that can still turn out some fairly decent models.

I will update this tread as my build continues. During the process comments and suggestions are very welcome.

A short history of the PT-76 tank
The PT-76 was developed in 1949-1951 under the leadership of Zh. Ya. Kotin, and officially adopted on 16 August 1952. The production started in 1953 at the Volgograd Tractor Factory. In 1958 an improved variant, PT-76B, was adopted and remained in production until 1963.

About 7,000 PT-76s were built during the vehicle's lifetime, of which about 2,000 were exported. Over 25 countries employed the vehicle, including Afghanistan, Angola, China, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Finland, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Laos, Madagascar, Mozambique, North Korea, Pakistan, Poland, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia.

The tank is still in active service in a number of countries. The Russian Army is reported to have used PT-76 units in the ongoing war in Chechnya, and the Indonesian Army used it on the Indonesian island of Ambon during civil unrest from 2000 onwards.

Source: Wikipedia.org

First impressions

Looking through the instructions and the parts of the model, it is readily clear that this is not a model for the rivet counter or the beginner. The instructions are not detailed and the placement of parts are just indicated with arrows, making it up to the modeller to guess where exactly the part is to be placed on the model.



The decal sheet is very comprehensive with 5 sets of different numbers, six USSR navy flags, white stribes for what seems to be for a version for the Hungarian uprising in the 50-ties and two USSR "guards" armour markings.



The strange thing is that the instruction sheet only gives the profile of one apparently generic vehicle with numbers that are not represented on the decal sheet.



Some research is definently necessary to build the model with all minor fittings in the right place and with appropriate markings and camouflage. My initial thoughts were to build this as a muddy vehicle from Chechenya or a Syrian vehicle with three coulour camoflage during the wars with Israel. If anybody have some other good suggestions to markings and camouflage I would be very grateful.

After these first impressions construction can begin....

Construction begins

The model is made up of two types of plastic. White sprues that are made of a very soft and fragile plastic and light grey sprues that are made up of "normal" plastic as usually found in plastic kits.

Initial construction is straight forward with all wheels coming together nicely. Only problem is some very heavy flash on the sprockets that require some cleaning up.

The lower hull is badly warped, but is constructed from the soft white plastic that can easily be bend to the right shape.

Problems arise when the water intakes for the water jet on the back of the hull are to be constructed. The water intakes are miscast on my example and needed to be partly scratch build. It looks bad from the inside, but fine from the outside. This problem should be easy to solve for the average modeller.











While the hull and the water intakes were drying up I went on to the turret. This practically falls together without any problems. However, the machinegun mounted next to the main gun needs some research before gluing in place and is not yet in place in this photo.



Going back to the hull a major and almost unsolveable problem revealed itself: the tracks. The tracks are made up of individual links. Due to the mounting on the sprues it is very difficult to see where the link starts and the sprue ends. Furthermore the links are made up of the white soft and fragile plastic making it very difficult to get them of the sprues without breaking the links.
To make things even worse about 20% of all the links on the sprues are badly warped. At this point I stopped and reconsidered the whole project. Is it even worth the time to take all the links of the sprues if they are warped anyway? Should I go for aftermarket tracks? Are the tracks even that important if I go for a muddy PT-76 in Chechenya?
In the end I have decided to give the tracks a try and see how it ends up. I am not willing to spend money on after market tracks that would be 3 or 4 times the cost of the model itself. Especially not if I decide to go for the muddy variant from Chechenya.





I have now cut all the links from the sprues with minimal casualties among the tracks It will still be very difficult to make decent tracks from the kit supplied tracks, but I will still give it a try.

Going back to the hull there are some quite big recessed pinmarks on the fenders and back hull. However, these should be very simple to correct.

Possible replacement tracks, if necessary, are the ZSU-23/4 tracks from DML. I do not know if they will fit the EE PT-76B sprocket, but I would assume so (assumptions being what they are... ).

I am watching your work with a close eye...I have this kit myself and want to do a good job on it. One recomendation I have is to get the Eduard PE set for this kit. I know it is expensive and I know that it shouldn't always be necessary to get the PE set for kits, but the EE kits really do benefit from the PE, unless you are going to do more scratchbuilding. I like to see how others scratchbuild!

You are doing a excellent job, both with the build and the report, keep up the good work.

Watching this one with interest.

Nice thread. I built this kit when it first was released and added the Eduard set (a must really - especially for the brush guards around the lights!) I too had a time withthe tracks, but with some patience they went on okay.

I too redid the water vents on the hull sides and bought the AEF designs update (Yea, I know - USELESS!!!!)

Thanks for the post.


Chris

I'll be watching this thread, I've wanted to build this one as a dio of the Battle of Lang Vei with SF troopers inspecting a PT-76 that was knocked out.

Certainly looks like an improvement over the Glencoe (I think) model. That one is horrible! Keep us informed

The Glencoe kit is a mid-90s rebox of the ancient ITC/Ringo kit from the 1960s.

OW! (looks around) Dammit, stepped on it again!

Gary got me again. Geeze, I think the Soviets went away from the whole blasted series just to standardize on one track style...yeesh.

To clarify, yes, the PT-76 track is unique and NOT the ZSU-23/4 track. Me and my fast mouth and slow research! :-)

Hi interesting project. I had it in mind too but was not confident bout the kit quality.
EE seem to be a bit off concening their instruction sheets and their decaling instructions.

The tracks seem to be cast in the white soft plastic you mentioned in the kit review. So they should be not that hard to bent in the correct shpae without too much damage. Could you confirm this as it seems that no AM tracks are available ?

Concerning your choice about the decoaration, I fear you can't depict one of these durng the Chechnya conflict. I may be wrong but to me this APC has been phased out for a while and replaced by a naval variant of he BTR-80.

Olivier

Thank you for the encouragement guys! I appreciate it a lot.

Right now I am gathering some pictures from the internet to use as research. Anybody who has an interest in the PT-76 can drop me a PM with an email adress and I can forward some pictures from the internet in a Word document.




I suspect that the tracks could be bend carefully into a "useable" form since they are made from the white softer plastic. I will try this later and get back to you all with the result.




I think you might be right. I read on the internet that a small numbers of these had been used in Chechenya, but I cannot remember the source. The safe bet would probably be to model it a something else.

Hi, I think this is thescene you are talking about. From a cynical point of view this would definently solve some of the track problems if you show the PT-76 half burried as here. Thre downside is the lack of camouflage painting and markings. Even though it looks like there are some camouflage painting on the hull I think it is only the difference between wet and dry dust/mud (?)



I am tempted to make a NVA PT-76 at a later stage in the war from the early 70-ties. Possibly with the big NVA stars on the turret or the hull, even though this would be speculation as I have not seen any pictures of a PT-76 from this period. Also the colour scheme will most probably be overall russian green. A Syrian camo of sand and grey over russian green might look more attractive. As you can read I have not decided on the camouflage and markings yet

Rob-- did you ever build or try to build that monster? The Glencoe one ranks right next to the M551 Sheridan by Jaguar....expensive losers.
DJ

Well, construction is finished. All the fittings on the side of the hull have no holes or clear instructions so had to be placed according to references. The bad part of this is that references are not consistent. Things like differences during the production life of the PT-76 and repairs to museum vehicles makes it difficult to determine exactly where everything go.

The hull went together well with only limited filling necessary. These areas have been marked with red in the pictures.







The only major missing issues on the hull is the lack of guards for the front lights. Again references are ambigous. Some show guards over both right and left set of lights, other show no guards at all and other pictures show only guards on one of the set of lights. The types of guards also varies a lot.
I have decided to strachbuild light guards from piano wire for both sets of lights. Most references of "in action" photos show both sets of light guards.

The major issues missing on the turret is the handrails running around the turret and the cover for the snorkel on the back of the turret. The hand rails I will scratchbuild from plastic, but cover for the snorkel I have not decided on yet.



The tracks I have put together but not trimmed yet. I let the glue dry a little bit before I pushed them down with a ruler. That actually took some of the mis-shaping out of the tracks, but not entirely. More pictures will follow when I have them assembled on the hull.

Jesper-- keep up the good work! Very nice work.
DJ

I built the PT-76 and FROG, both use a common chassis, both are poor kits by any standards. I would not call the Glencoe kit expensive. In the mid-90s it showed up on the shelves for a measly $9.99.

I'm also building this kit and agree with everything you've mentioned so far. I'm in the process of adding the missing weld beads, there's quite a few both on the turret and the hull. Overall I'm very happy with the kit, it should build up quite nicely.

@DJ Judge: thank you for the kind words.

Weld beads (?)




It is true that the kit is almost free of weld beads. However, in this scale I am not planning on adding any, since I think they are very small on this lightly armoured vehicle. At least on the reference pictures below. Where are you adding weld beads?





Turret handrails and snorkel cover
The handrails for the turret is finished now. They posed no problem at all. Plastic card triangles where glued to the turret and plastic rod glued in place into small semicircles cut into the plastic triangles.
This is really a must to add to the model as all PT-76 I have seen in references have these even though the style differs on some examples.



What I am doing about the missing snorkel cover on the back of the turret I do not know? Anybody has any suggestion on this? I was thinking of making one in green stuff/milliput but I think it will not get perfectly round.
Here is a picture of the real thing. The snorkel cover is the round dome on back of the turret in the middle.



Light guards - never ending story
I spend some time adding the light guards from piano wire. It has the right thinkness and looked really good. Normally I work with brass wire, but my local hobby store was out of stock. Piano wire, no problem I thought. Wrong! I made up both lights guards just fine, but when everything had cured over night I tried to cut excess piano wire off the the light guards. Everything broke apart without me being able to cut the piano wire properly. Though luck. Well, now I will make it from plastic rod even though this might make it a bit over scale.





Here is what was left of my light guards after trying to trim them



Markings and camouflage

I am planning to paint it as a Syrian vehicle in the Golan heights during the war with Israel. This is because the Syrians used a very colourful camouflage and this one needs some colour in this size.
However, I would also like to use the colourful Soviet navy flag markings. Both are obviously not possible, so what to do? Well, I was hoping that someone could help me with a camouflage pattern used by the Soviet navy on their armoured vehicles. I think I have seen some pictures of green vehicles with light grey or sand camo patterns. Can anybody help me with that?

Thanks for looking and reading.

Well, now it is back to the model working on the tracks and the plastic light guards.

Great job with what looks like a dog of a kit. I love this. Rarely am I seeing basic improvements like these in projects now. All scratch, and no PE. Great

@Zokissima: Thanks for the encouragement

Do not worry about the green spray on the model. I was just testing a new type of paint. Remember to wash the parts before painting as the paint will not stick as good as normal. I know, I forgot to wash mine

light guards

I have scratch build the light guards from Evergreen plastic rod. This is an area that would benefit from PE, but I went for the plastic rod instead.

It is worth noticing that the mountings for the head lights are probably to far ahead on the hull as the big right side headlight will prevent the front wave guard to unfold properly.





Tracks

The result with the tracks are actually quite satisfying taking the starting point with badly bend links into account. The links can be straighted carefully with a plastic ruler when the length of links are glued together. However, be careful not to loose any links. I did not loose any and only had 7 links left. I had to go back to the spues where i had left the links that where very badly bend. These had to be straighted and used to ensure I had enough links.

Summary of the build of Eastern Express PT-76.

The kit is overall a very nice kit that comes together well. However, there are some pitfalls:

The tracks are badly bend and the links are difficult to cut from the sprues. This can be solved with a little careful bending and actually leaves you with OK tracks. Also the front and back mud/waterguards are missing in the kit, but they are easy to make from pladstic card or foil.

The water intakes on the side of the hull for the water jet needs to be partly scratchbuild to look right and fill the whole in the side of the hull.

The instructions are very bad and it is very difficult to determine the right placement of smaller details on the model. Reserach is necessary even though pictures show various placement of the details.

Only one overall green colour scheme is provided, but no decals of the numbers in the profile. However, a big nice decal sheet is provide for various other unspecified colour schemes.

The turret lacks the turret handrails that are on all PT-76s I have seen pictures of, even though the style of the handrails differ.

The light guards are missing from the kit and the fittings for the head lights are fitted to far ahead on the hull preventing the rising of the front wave guard.

Conclusion
All in all a nice model that needs some TLC to get right, but none the less can build into a reasonable model with out the use of any after market products. However, if I had to build it again I would invest in a PE set.
I enjoyed building this kit and after all that is what the hobby is all about for me

This one has been on my wish list for a long time. Just got held off, since I'd never seen any built up. This thread is just what I was waiting for

Glad you liked it and glad to help A PE set for the mudguards and some TLC for the tracks and she will build up just fine.

The variations in colour schemes and markings from many different countries also makes this an attractive vehicle to build IMO.

Here are a couple of pictures (with and without flash) after the first coat of Russian green. It will get large blotches of dark sand and mid grey after that to make it a Syrian vehicle. Markings I have not decided on yet.