When your head is full of new ideas, the shelves are stacked with kits, the shelf of shame is overflowing with projects to finish and you just HAVE TO do that “one” kit, simply because you feel the deep desire, urge to do so.
I have landed in said predicament…
Stuarts and figures to be painted, halftracks to be finished, Shermans to be built, campaigns running and upcoming, ideas for kitbashing an Abrams… and I just want to bult something Soviet!!! There is this T-72 kit that just keeps pulling me in; a horrible kit, bad fit, dimensions way off and features just wrong… (Dragon/Italeri T-72M1), but I just want to have a go at it…
So what do I do…?
Exactly! I break out the kit and get going!
Hahah!!
New kit from the stash time. So much effort. So much potential. So much opportunity. But you choose to try to pick up a turd from the clean end. Ron good luck wrestling with this beast, I hope you complete it. Don’t let it beat you down!
As long as you build a bad kit, you will be angry with the company, with yourself, with the tank itself, with the Soviets who built it and whom you don’t like anyway. It’s better to gather your strength and throw away this set or give it to a neighbor’s boy. And then buy a good modern set with good instructions, good convergence of parts and closer to the original - and enjoy the assembly, pleasing yourself and delighting those around you. A?
Why? I’m gonna have fun with it, see it as a challenge and it was almost free. Less then $7.50. It will match Tamiya’s illconceived T-62, which I also had fun with.
Those good sets… which ones would that be? Those that cost $50 or more, still have issues despite having 1001+ parts? Not my style.
Ohh and edit; who says I do not like “the Soviets”? I haven’t met that many… and the 2 I did meet, were ok. Whacky, but ok.
Who were the Soviets anyway?
Go for it Ron! I have this in the stash and one day will wrestle it into something half-decent.
I found the main thing with these kits (ex Dragon as you identify) is that the main armament is too large; replace the barrel and that’ll make quite a difference - in my opinion of course. T-72 Ninjas will, I’m sure know what else needs adjusting - but in the meantime - just build it.
Here are a few start off images.
As I said I got this one for about $7.50, adding any form of AM would be useless or overkill. Just a replacement barrel would triple the total cost.
What I got was this; a tattered, dusty box, which had been damp at one point (you should’ve seen the T-80 box and spares… one half desolved by moisture and mould) and the lower hull was missing a row of wheel attachments.
The T-72M1 actually mostly resembles a T-72B… The barrel is indeed huge, guess it would be closer to a 200MM caliber in real life. “Details” are either soft or very prominent.
Together they will be a representation of that which we dreaded when being conscripts; Soviet tanks and Nuclear, Biological or Chemical warfare. As icing on the cake I will add snow and mud.
The things about old kits that leads people to warn against them have nothing to do with accuracy. It’s that the kits are often not simple, often have poor instructions, often have poor fit, often have issues with flash and giant locators - or none at all, often have unusable vinyl tracks or tires, and often have compromises for “working” or “pose-able” features that are just too much to overlook. What ends up happening is that the modeler has to spend a lot of time on tedious clean up, adjusting parts, filling holes and so on such that the “frustration” part of the build far overwhelms the “fun” part. You get 10 or 20 hours into building it and you realize you that it’s not going to get any better and you kick yourself for wasting time. Many of us have been in that very situation.
Or, as one of my officers succinctly put it when I was serving (I was, as usual, fighting a rearguard action) and I stated “Sir, you can’t polish a turd”.
He replied, “No Sergeant Major, but you can roll it in glitter”.
We trundle along with this build. Have been a bit under the weather these past days, so not that much done.
I was given a replacement barrel for the ginormous kitbarrel. But the metal Aber-specimen is a kit in and of itself and I feel rather intimidated by its complexity! Now I have a Tamiya-version on the way. I’d rather deal with 4 pieces of plastic instead.
How do I assemble such a metal barrel with a myriad of tiny components anyway?
Tracks fall together rather nicely, so I can not figure out why they mismatch the sprockets that badly? Are these tracks even designed for this kit??
Other than that no real issues so far. But I haven’t checked for dimensions…
I share your pain re the gun barrel Ron; too late for your build perhaps but I tend to opt for Accurate Armour’s efforts - a simple one-piece length of resin (with a wire in the middle).
replying.
