Hi! Quick tip for anyone building this or any Trumpeter Zil-157/151 or BM-13 kits, I didn’t exactly study the instructions like i probably should’ve and put on a part incorrectly. One of the crossbeam (circled below) requires to be put on in the correct side.
(Note the position of the square bits poking out of the angled plate)
Here’s the way I applied this crossbeam:
I unfortunately put this part on while it was flipped in the other direction, and it does come back to mess up construction later–so make sure to take note of this. If you’ve got some spare plastic rod or plastic to fix this this isn’t that much of a major problem I think, but its definitely worth it to be safe than sorry. I’ll just get some plastic rod and see how well I can work around this.
Also another note, the rear axle construction issues I’ve experienced has gotta be a user error, keep in mind to really dry fit this rear axle section before you glue it all together (I didn’t do so, so i had to force it into the chassis). Here’s some areas of note though:
In the image above, the red circles point out these parts which slide into one of the axles’ slots. (circled in blue below)
These parts were honestly quite annoying, they’re one of those parts that fit TOO well (or not well enough if you look at it differently). These parts start to show stress marks in the plastic and they’re honestly a pain to slide into the axles, I tried to scrape some plastic off of these connecting points but if this happens in your kit then you should definitely scrape off more than I did.
Also keep on the lookout for these suspension parts highlighted in red and take extra care for how you glue them together.
(Also side note, E42’s fit into E49 was way too snug, and might require some plastic scraping.)
I didn’t keep track of how these were assembled and it directly caused the fit issue between the back axle and the chassis due to these suspension assemblies being the contact points between the back axle and the chassis.
(Another side note, I did hopefully implement a fix to the back axle’s connection points! Powel pointed it out to me and although I didn’t have a metal rod to fix this I just connected these parts with more VMS ca glue.)
Finally, I’m pretty sure I either switched both E43 and E44 (the parts that fit TOO well) and it caused these arms/sticks? to be SIGNIFICANTLY misaligned.
(Gosh I’m a mess…

I ended up breaking the poles that these arms/stick things were meant to slide into, and just glued them onto whatever surface they ended up reaching with VMS ca glue. (the red circle marks the ends of the arm and the blue circle marks the area where the ends are supposed to make contact with)
Hope this will find its way to help out someone!