Wednesday 22 August 2012

Revell 10,5 cm leFH 18 in 1/72


The kit “German Artillery WWII” is a real gem. It consists of two 105 mm leFH 18 (leichte Feldthaubitze), one in a towed position and the other in action, seven crewmembers standing (one of them is less good, I won’t use that one), a six-horse team with three riders, a limber with an additional four crew and one horse with rider. A total of two guns, one limber, seven horses and 15 men in one kit. I bought in on a sale for about €5, a phenomenal price.
So this would seem to be a perfect set, and it would get highest possible grades… if only it had been in hard plastics. Now that is sadly not the case, instead we get a rather soft plastic.
That gave me a lot of problems:
- Glue doesn’t stick, neither ordinary plastics glue, nor my Loctite superglue.
- Some of the tinier pegs broke when I cleaned the flash from them, meaning I had to drill holes and peg the parts with plastic rod. This happened with the peg fastening the gun to the carriage and also on the pegs joining the spades to the carriage.  A nuisance.
- As usual paint doesn’t stick… Partly solved with white glue but I still had problems with these large areas. I believe that I should spray paint over the glue in the future, to avoid smearing glue/paint.
Anyway, the two guns are finished, they look OK and will serve well in future games. The crew is on the painting table, and the horses and limber moved back to the plastics mountain.

2 comments:

  1. Good job. A little trivia: This set is upscaled from a 1/87 scale Preiser set. The original is in hard plastic, too bad Revell decided to release it in soft plastic.

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  2. I have this kit and I agree about the plastic. By the way, the Soviet Forward Observer in my army is one of the crew from this kit.

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