Introduction

Reality in Scale is well known among modellers that like to do dioramas and vignettes. They release quite a number of items each year and it is always exciting to see new stuff from that brand. The subject of this review is a set of damaged German WW2 Drums.

Review

The item comes packed in a small hard plastic box with information and example of painted drums printed and glued on top. The image is rather small and rather dark, but it doesn’t really matter as you can find thousands of examples of crushed drums on the web.

Upon opening I discovered 10 drums with various degrees of damage, ranging from minor cracks to completely squashed. The drums are resin and somehow they have been moulded in different coloured resin. Whether this is a result of necessity of different resin types to be used to achieve damage or just different coloured materials that were used I don’t know. But what is, regardless of the resin colour, is that all 10 drums (or drum wrecks) have sharp detail and have no casting defects. Moreover, the drums do not require any clean up and can be used straight from the package for your diorama or simple groundwork for vehicle (the 2 drums with remains of casting blocks can be submerged into groundwork, or cleaned if desired).

Most of them are supposed to be placed vertically with the exception of 1 fully squashed, 1 half (that one should be used submerged into groundwork) and 2 that are supposed to be lying on their side. The lids have markings for Wehrmacht (general name for German armed forces) and Heer (land forces); flammable (feuergefährlich), fuel (kraftstoff) 200L and B43 meaning it is gasoline (benzene). The 2 lying drums also have bottoms with markings. The drums in that set have reinforcing ribs in 4 standard areas (of course when it is the full drum present) plus 2 plugs (one on the top and the other on the side). Size wise they are around 2,5cm height (875mm converted to real scale) which is very close to 880 standard 200L drum height. For the size and detail comparison I included a fuel drum from Bronco Models Hungarian drum set and 1 from Plus model which is also German but has no detail on the lid.
As there are 10 items included one can easily place them on several vignettes or 1 diorama. When it comes to painting please be aware that German 200L drums were made of galvanized metal covered with Zink and the reinforcement ribs were made of steel. Very often these drums were not painted (and this is proven by war time colour images) but some of them were. So there is a lot of room and options for your painting skills.

reference

Preserved Items Live links

Conclusion

Overall, this is a great set that I can recommend to anyone looking for this kind of scenery. In theory one could make similar items yourself but this offering has excellent detail, varied options and saves a lot of time!