A Facebook page I follow called ‘The Interesting Modelling Company’ were discussing the Zvezda ‘Art of Tactic’ series of kits a couple of weeks ago and saying that for snap-together kits they were pretty well detailed. With that I had a look on Ebay and the PaK40 set was listed at just £2.99 with 88p post and packing so I sent for it and a few days later it turned up;
After opening the box and examining the parts my first impressions were that it looked OK but nothing stella, the parts were well moulded with little to no flash and detail was adequate for the scale but not exactly mind-blowing.
Anyway I started cutting bits from the sprue and began assembling the kit (which only took about 4 hours in total) and although it’s a ‘snap-fit’ model I did use liquid glue and superglue to strengthen joints and to repair the gun shield which I managed to break in half removing it from the sprue.
The joints on the figures are oddly broken down and if you just push-fit them together you will have gaps, however I found that by applying liquid glue then pushing the parts together really helped to make the joints disappear.
Detail-wise the only thing I did extra was to drill out the gun barrel although I may carve the grooves in the tyres before painting. One thing that would have been good to include in the kit are boxes for the 7.5cm ammunition however Zvezda don’t so I may make a couple from scratch.
It’s not a bad little kit but in this scale the subject is a little too small for me however I was curious about it and it didn’t cost much in time or money. These kits are designed to complement the Zvezda board-gaming system but are pretty decent in their own right and would make a good introduction to modelling without breaking the bank. The detailing is good enough for what they are but leave plenty of scope for extra work. It’s doubtful I’ll get any more due to the small scale but it was interesting to see how they shape up.
Andy King's Model Blog 