The transmission has been out for literally decades, in plastic no less. Of course there are many on this site who wouldn’t be caught dead purchasing the Skif T-55, which is why I easily bought them up at shows for sofa change once the Tamiya kit came out. As bad as the kit was, the “engine” and transmission actually had some pretty good pieces, including a fan with photo etched blades. They had fairly good shape, and just needed the usual bits and bobs as any good scratch build needs. It’s as if a different design team worked on the interior. Of course it still wasn’t the greatest, but it was certainly better than the rest of the kit. I happily bogarted the parts from these and binned the rest of the kit. After a bit of work, no one ever complained that they didn’t look right.
Edit: I found the old photos on the now useless Photobucket site.
If there was anything worse than the older Skif offerings, it was some of the Verlinden crap. Here’s the Skif fan (it spins on a brass axle!) installed on the horrible Verlinden engine bay, which is not only out of proportion (the cylinder heads are noticeably too far apart) but has very little undercut detail, similar to the engine in the Italeri M-47 or the old Tamiya Marder.
I mounted these in the new Tamiya T-55 right after getting back from Afghanistan, fresh with photos of wrecks from the famed boneyard east of Kabul in Poli-charki.
It was fun doing the transmission shifter housing from tiny bits of plastic. I’d never pull that off today…
Actual turret area is sparse and suggested a la Shep Paine. No one really needs to shine a 3500 lumen light down into the turret hatches. The sun doesn’t do that, xeptin’ maybe dead balls at the equator.