Glad to see the re-release of the 30cwt LRDG chevy. There are resin options for the tires and Resicast are working on some neat fixees for the kit, so more options there too. I picked up the old Italeri Commando Car about 2 weeks ago for £8.00 so I'll not be going with this version. Both kits will build up well with a bit of TLC and if I remember correctly the Kubblewagon was quite a good kit too. Al

Hi Dean, Resicast make excellent Airborne conversions for the Tamiya Willys MB Jeep. Al

Hi Dean, Resicast make excellent Airborne conversions for the Tamiya Willys MB Jeep. Al[/quote] Yeah that's true, I'd forgotten about those.

The German officer looks like the figure from the '70s Kubel. and Schwimm. kits.

Quick, last chance to sell those LRDG Chevy's on ebay for silly money, a few weeks back they were going for up to £70-£80, prices have tailed off a bit now.

Ha Ha. I remember a certain crook selling Tamiya Brewster Buffalos at ridiculous prices back in the 80's because 'the molds have been lost/damaged'. Then Tamiya reissued the kit.......last time I saw the guy was at a model show in london.........he was sporting a black eye.....I wonder why?

I'm no expert about all that is available and the difference between this kit and that kit, but what I would like to see is for Tamiya to quit making such stiff looking figures and to do a little better on the hands and make them look more natural and not like some mannequin in a museum. I do like their model kits though.

For those interested in the LRDG Chevy, keep an eye on Resicast. Graham has some new items on the market now see here: LINK Also in the pipe line some headsets, 4 more figures and a range of stowage and update sets. A total of 5 stowage sets for the LRDG chevy soon to be re-released by Tamiya. The first will be for the Tamiya kit as it is: a radio truck. This will however be an early version with typical UK items of that time (Lewis Guns,Flimsies,etc. The second stowage set will be for the Breda gun truck (gun on cargo bed, not towed). These are to eb followed bythree more stowage sets: a late version of the radio truck with late stowage (US /UK jerrycan, .50 guns and so forth) and a early (UK stowage) and late v (US stowage) of the basic vehicle. There is also a neat set of wheels should you just need to repalce the Tamiya tires. Al

Rehashing their back catalogue kits and relying on other companies' releases seems to be the Tamiya Way now, which is unfortunate. They do seem to have dropped several bundles along the way, failing to capitalise on the Char B for instance, when there are a heap of early war French AFVs to model. The releases are, as observed, fairly vintage, but the Italerei SAS Jeep 'Commando Car' was a sweet little kit in the day - there are upgrades to bring the base Jeep kit up a few notches, which would help. The Officer and DAK figures are the really interesting ones - yes, they're familiar, because they're available in 1/16 scale. Tamiya have done this before - you might have seen these around the hobby store, little white boxes with two usually unrelated 1/35 scale figures. One of the previous offerings was Rommel coupled with the Stg44 Winter Infantryman, and another had a more useful Panzer Officer and MG42 Gunner. These white box figures are the best Tamiya 35th scale figures ever - okay, that's a sitting target, look at the Churchill Crocodile dudes with the SAS Jeep... The white box 35th scale figures follow the breakdown of the larger scale figures, meaning they're plenty detailed. Some attention to goodies on these figures will pay off. Grab 'em if you see 'em, I will and I'm not even modelling again yet. acav out