I “won” this kit at a figure show last summer. Anything that wasn’t a figure went into the ordnance category. I present to you the 1972 vintage Tamiya KV1.
The instructions were in Japanese, there was a small tube of Tamiya glue included, and it was designed to be a motorized kit. The gearbox was complete but sometime over the last 50 years the motor went missing. There was no option to build the kit without using the gearbox so I broke out the Dremel and cut it up to salvage the axel. Next up was to fill in all the motorization holes in the bottom of the hull pan and the L shaped slots on either side of the rear hull designed to allow the gearbox and axel to be dropped in. Once the lower hull was taken care of the rest of the construction was pretty straight forward.
I did do a couple of enhancements. The plastic tow cables were replaced with wire inserted into the drilled out kit cable ends. The turret was roughed up using Testor’s liquid cement and a stiff brush to give it the cast look, and plastic strip was used to to fill in the periscope slots. No real issues except that both fender fuel tanks were out of round and needed some work to get them to look better. The kit tracks were a bit twisted but I managed to get them to lay flat by moving them around the running gear till I found a spot where they would lay the flattest. Surprisingly the barrel was a one piece affair. The whole thing was base coated in flat black then sprayed with flat white in random areas before being given a base coat of a custom mixed green left over form another project. Tamiya paints were used. Weathering was done with dark oil washes and dry brushing.
