Wade’s World Review: Dragon T-34-85 1944 #6066
Back in 1997, this was one of the new releases, I couldn’t wait to acquire. Purchased three kits when it arrived at the hobby shop for serious contest building etc.
1 Price MSRP ~$85 (WTF!), Online Vendor ~$68, in 1997, paid $100 for 3 kits at a friendly local hobby shop or ~$33.
5 Instructions Model is simple & Instructions are pretty clear…yes 
for Dragon 
1 Molding Quality 
Even love doesn’t necessarily last forever!
Every wheel had a nasty sink mark between every spoke for every wheel in all three model kits. ~120 sink marks on a curved surface needed filling and sanding to get a set of acceptable road wheels. My friends that purchased #6066 kits noted the same molding issue on the wheels.
My kits weren’t suitable as out of the box builds in my opinion due to sinkmarks and difficulty fixing them. Thankfully Chesapeake Model Design soon offered a replacement set of spider wheels.
This in my opinion was an engineering design failure as the rest of the kit was well molded. It wasn’t likely a quality issue due to a lazy injection molding machine operator. Dragon later tweaked the wheels.
4 Plastic Quality good quality
3 Parts Clean Up low parts count, however there’s a fair amout of mold seams that needed removed. The kit tracks also had punch marks. The road wheels were previously mentioned.
5 Ease of Build Builds easy and satisfactory after the wheels and tracks are replaced with quality aftermarket.
4 Accuracy T-34 wheels don’t have nasty sink marks like the kit parts did. However, overall a very nice kit.
5 Fit Excellent and no issues other than a little fiddling with the turret halves.
1 Doesn’t Require Aftermarket wheels were trash, tracks were unappealing
CMD wheels, Fruilmodel tracks were bare minimum for my kit.
0 Details built Out of the Box with the defective wheels in the kit, this kit was an automatic fail by any judge looking at basic construction. Sure tons of mud could be dumped on the wheels and suspension to attempt to hide sinkmarks but that’s always suspicious 
Perth Military Modelling: Premium Dragon T-34-85 1944 #6319
Dragon later tweaked the wheels in some manner. I’ve seen newer kits like #6319 with good quality road wheels as my copy of that kit was blemish free.
29 pts out of 50
29/50 => 58%
Not Recommended with a #6066 one might get lucky and get a good one or get burned. I wouldn’t allow a copy of #6066 in my stash if it was free.
If one wants this subject from Dragon, #6319 is a far superior offering. The Premium #6319 kit is also available at a lower price!
Yes, it’s got the good stuff too!
#6319 - Highly Recommended this kit addresses my gripes with #6066. I suspect it would get a Wade’s World Review score of about ~45 of 50 or 90%.
