From: Michael Blair <amfortas@h...>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 09:48:34 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [GZG] Re: 25mm scale armour - Plastic Kits
I know 1/48th scale is not quite right for 25mm scale figures but it is as good as you will get for plastic kits and slightly too big is not bad as they look big and impressive. 1/48th is the coming scale for armour with new kits from Tamiya and others. Unfortunately the Tamiya kits are relatively expensive, proper kits with lots of pieces and only of WW II subjects. However there are cheaper alternatives A Chinese company, it seems to be both Zhengdefu and Kitech do a wide range of approximately 1/48th scale kits of modern tanks, AFVs/IFVs and some 8-wheeled vehicles. Everything is built on one of two motorised chassis, one for tracked and one for wheeled so the running gear is the same for each type of vehicle hence the variation is scale to match the size of the chassis. I found the detail to be, surprisingly, better than for the equivalent Academy kits which could be a little soft though bear in mind the only 1/48th scale Academy tank kits I have are the M-60 and the Challenger I with an old Panther (the best of the three until a long ago misguided attempt to turn it into a blower panzer) so others might be better. They are quite cheap and sometimes easy to find  it seems to be glut or famine and for a while I made a point of buying all I saw until I had a nice big box of them. Usefully they do some Japanese and French tanks that are unlikely to be recognised by anyone who is not French, Japanese or an anorak (unfortunately many wargamers are  I am). Airfix also had an Airfix Junior range of Heller originated kits with two very nice French based armoured cars. The hull is the same for both but one has two axles and the other three. The former ha a slightly dodgy missile turret with two side mounted missiles and the latter a rather nice turret with a long barrelled gun. Detail is slightly soft and the plastic a little odd but there is a lot of potential here. These seem to be getting hard to find, I only ever saw them in one shop in Belfast (The Dungeon or Modellers' Nook) and he is good at producing strange things (and charging too much for them). There are websites out there with better conversion articles than anything I can do, those by the Salute crowd are excellent. The link, as if anyone needs it, is: http://www.salute.co.uk/slammers3/index.htm Evergreen styrene, particularly the tubing and textured plasticard from Evergreen and Slaters are your friends as is the brass tubing and rod from KS Metals and the various detailing sets from Tamiya, Academy and Italeri. I should also point out that my FLGS carries Evergreen styrene, I used to find it very hard to find so I think it is worth posting the link. http://www.netmerchants.co.uk/ One thing I would like to try is a remote gun mount like the Stryker MGS and various earlier light tanks. This should be fairly easy to do.