introduction

OKB Grigorov is a familiar name in 1/72 armor accessories, with a great range of photo-etched detail sets both for vehicles and general diorama usage. This is their first foray into injection-molded accessories.

This is a set of suspension elements for the M48 series of tanks, used by the US from the 1950's into the 1990's, and used by numerous allies around the world. The set covers the road wheels, return rollers, suspension arms and T97E2 track. The packaging suggests ESCI, Italeri or Revell as sources for the M48 series in 1/72 scale.

contents

The set gives you an instruction sheet and 6 sprues in total, 4 of which are the wheels and arms with the last 2 being the track elements. All are cleanly molded in a reddish-brown plastic with medium-sized connector-gates between the sprues and the parts themselves. There are no part numbers on any of the sprues, but the instruction sheet includes a layout of the trees with numbering for the sprues of track elements.

the set

The sprues for the wheels and arms end up with a number of spare parts, as the layout results in more wheels (both road wheels and return rollers) than are needed. Only the suspension arms themselves are given as the exact number needed. There were no flaws that I could see on any of the parts on these 4 sprues.

The sprues for the track suffer a bit, compared to the wheels. There are some sink-marks on many of the track parts, most of all the long runs for the top and bottom of the suspension. Not all the parts suffer from this, and the smaller runs and individual links will be easier to clean up the sink marks, the longer runs will prove to be more difficult.

The instructions are a single sheet, with simple diagrams for assembling the road wheels and return rollers. The diagram for the track is a little more detailed, and calls out the parts by number. The numbers for the parts are given on the sprue layout at the top of the sheet. The instructions are straight-forward and should not be a problem to any modeler familiar with using accessory sets like this. The only confusing aspect to the instructions are that some pins have to be cut away on the return rollers, and while the instructions only show removing the pin on one of each set, both wheels have this pin. Leaving one pin in place with no locating hole might lead to the return rollers being spaced too far apart. You will have to test-fit them against the hull of the tank to make sure the spacing is correct.

conclusion

Overall, this is a very nice set with some excellent molding. Only the sink marks on the treads detract from the set as a whole, and these should be fairly easy to deal with, given that the longer runs will be hidden either by side-skirts or by virtue of being face-down on the surface you display the model on. Having to perform surgery on the parts is also a down-side, but the improvement these parts offer over the kit parts (where each pair of road wheels is a single piece!) is enormous.

OKB Grigorov do not list a price for this set on their home-page. However, they do link to several online retailers who carry their line and thus would have this set on offer.