Introduction

Black Dog uses a nice sturdy cardboard box for all their kits and this set, #T48026, deals with various British equipment accessories. Inside the box is a ziplock bag containing the parts and this kit should not worry you with respect to rattling around and breaking the pieces. The box art is nicely done and is well representative of the actual gear. It is all the instruction you’ll get however on how to use the set, so you're on your own in that department.

What you get

In the zip lock back you get a wide range of pieces. It looks like you should get two of each “block.” The blocks include:
- Small cluster of personal gear (Helmet, backpack, bed roll)
- Large cluster of personal gear (helmet, tarps, shovel, bed roll)
- Four Pack gas/water tanks
- Individual personal gear (backpacks)
- Large tarp rolled up
- Small tarp rolled up
- Small arms ammo crate
- Small gear crate
- Medium ammo crate
- Small artillery crate (2 pound ammo)
- Large artillery crate (17 pound ammo)
- Small Stowage box
- Large stowage box

The parts

These parts are quite nice and each block has two pieces on it and the blocks are positioned in good locations. When you cut the resin block away there should not be much to clean up on the piece itself with the location usually on the bottom so it won’t show. The resin is a nice hard resin equal in quality to Verlinden or Custom Dioramics. There are no bubbles or holes or empty corners in any of the pieces.

Detail

For a smaller scale you might think that the detail would be lacking – it is not. There is detail on every part. The tarps have nice crisp folds and the ropes that hold them show strand twist details. Based on research of British boxes and crates the detail is representative of the real thing. Some of the personal backpacks have a bed roll strapped to the top and even these small packs have straps detailed on them.

Scale

With diorama accessories, especially after market resin kits, there is usually a discussion about scale. Is the piece too big, too small, is it 1/35th or 1/32nd - in this case 1/48th or 1/50th? I measured the helmet and found it to be within normal limits and therefore ‘in scale’. A 1:1 British helmet is 286mm wide at the brim. This converts to 5.9 mm in 1/48th scale. The kit helmets measure 5mm plus a smidge or so, all well with in measurable limits. Comparing these kit parts to a variety of 1/48th scale figures they are acceptable and in the pictures you can see that different figure manufactures are slightly different in scale. The backpack looks good on a Bandai kit, decent on a Tamiya kit, and too small on an old Monogram AC figure. From my experience and research I believe this size difference is mainly attributable ot the age and genre of the figures I used.

The boxes are close but not quite in scale as well. These measurements are done using a computer image and scaling it out based on a legend tool and therefore are subject to human error and interpretation. Two pound ammo boxes are 356 x 330 mm this converts to 7 x 6.8 mm and the the kit box is 8.5 x 4 mm. Not quite there, but very close.
The 17 pound ammo crate is 965 x 381 mm, this converts to 20 x 7.9 mm. The kit part is 18 x 6mm so this one is a bit short as a result.

Conclusion

Overall these are really nice pieces. The detail is really nice for the smaller 1/48th scale. The variety is good and the quantity of gear will surely span multiple projects. You’ll get a good solid product for your purchase.