Hauler produces photo-etched and resin upgrade sets for armored fighting vehicles (AFVs), airplanes, cars, railway vehicles, and dioramas. They also produce a few resin kits. Their products are in most of the common scale sizes, 1/72, 1/48, and 1/35, but they also produce a number of other items in common railroad hobbyist scales.

The kit for this review is a set of sharply cast resin Dragon Teeth. Dragon Teeth are those square concrete pyramids, most often associated with the Siegfried Line in Germany during World War II. However, these types of fortifications were used in many countries, other than Germany in World War II, and continued to be used today around the world. The idea behind these formations was to create an obstacle to slow the advance of enemy AFVs, or to channel those vehicles into prepared kill zones where anti-tank units waited in ambush.

A while back I built Dragon’s 1/144 F-14D Tomcat for a review. Master Models of Poland has come out with a replacement “alfa probe” for the Tomcat. I still think of it as a pitot tube, but I’m pretty 20th Century.

In doing a little research, I found that there are two other 1/144 F-14s available, Revell and Trumpeter. In looking at the “in box” reviews, both of these kits do have alfa probes. The Dragon kit I built doesn’t have one. OK. But I have built more than one model where the pitot tube has been broken, bent or deformed to where it really needs replacement. In the past, a cut off straight pin worked pretty well. Now we have a much better looking part.

The instructions are pretty basic, but so is the procedure. We’re not doing knee replacement here.

Cut off the existing probe. In this case, I just had to use a sanding stick to get a flat spot for the drill.

The Kit

The kit contains four sprues for the wagon, plus sprues for two horses, and three soldiers molded in light grey plastic. The four tires for the wagon are molded in black plastic. Not sure why the separate color for the tires since they are hard plastic and the entire kit would be painted anyway. The kit also contains a metal chain, two frets of photo etch parts, nylon string for the tow cables and a decal sheet which includes markings for the vehicle and uniform patches for the figures. The parts had some minor flash, but not troubles with sink holes or ejector pin marks. The only exception is on the wagon sides above the seat for the drivers and the floor of the machinegun cart. There are some unavoidable ejector pin marks, but they are hidden by the seated figures so I chose not to fill them. The crispness of the detail on the parts could be sharper, but is still pretty good.