Introduction

Modelkasten, despite it's Germanic sounding name, is a Japanese company that is famous for it's styrene working tank tracks. This kit is a substitute for the rather marginal rubbery tracks that come with Fine Molds' 1/35 Type 95 Light Tank kits.

Kit Contents

The kit comes with 1 instruction sheet, one large bag of 100 trees with 2 pins and 1 tooth each, one medium bag of 200 track link trees (one link per tree), one small bag with 4 trees with a half a drive sprocket and a spacer ring each, and 2 assembly jigs. As you can tell from the scans, the Modelkasten tracks put the Fine Molds tracks to shame. Since the Type 95 tracks seem to be symmetrical, assembly is made easier with no worry of having to use different parts for the left and right tracks.

Assembly

1. Remove all the links from their trees and clean them up.

2. Remove the pins from their trees but leave enough of the tree on to use as a handle.

3. Remove the teeth from their trees and clean them up.

4.You place the links into the jig (be careful you have the inner side with the slot in the middle facing up) then glue a pin into each side to link each pair of links. Use as little glue as possible here. Too little is better than too much. You might want to exercise the links as the glue sets in case some glue seeps out and gets between links. Each jig can hold 9 links. Modelkasten gives you 2 jigs so you can work on the left and right tracks at the same time.

5. After the glue has set, you can remove the "handle" from the pins.

6. Add the teeth to the center of each link.

Once the first 9 are dry, you can move the completed links to one end of the jig and add 8 more. Do this for 97 links on each track and hopefully, the result will be a long length of working track.

In order to fit the new tracks, sometimes the original kit's drive sprocket needs to be replaced. This is the case for the Type 95 Light Tank so Modelkasten provides you with the parts for two replacement drive sprockets.

Conclusion

This set is definitely the crowning touch for Fine Molds' Type 95 Light Tank, also Reviewed Here, assuming you are willing to put together a total of 194 links.

References
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Tankpower #9: "Japanese Armor, Vol.1", by Andrzei Tomcyk, AJ Press ISBN 83-7237-097-4