Background

The sturdy French built SPAD VII c.1 made its appearance on the Western Front in mid-1916. Although many French pilots considered the SPAD VII to be inferior to the Nieuport 17 as a dogfighter, it nevertheless proved to be a reliable and rugged fighter and was more than a match for any Central powers aircraft it encountered. The real strength of this aircraft was its durability in a dive and that it could take a lot of punishment and still stay airborne. SPADs were soon in production in Great Britain, as well as in Russia. In the spring of 1917, Russia received 43 SPAD aircraft which proved to be popular with Russian pilots. This original batch of SPADs was supplemented by 100 more SPAD VIIs manufactured by the Dux factory under license.

Introduction

This is one ‘Bear’ of a truck and one bear of a kit! The KrAZ weighs twelve tons, has a payload of seven and a half tons, and is nicknamed ‘The Bear’. The kit will definitely not fall together out of the box on a Sunday afternoon. A difficult kit to assemble, it’s worth the effort and builds into one massive truck!

Background

Excerpt from the instructions:

The Parts

The parts are secured in a small plastic bag with two stickers applied. The first of those stickers matches the product number “35674”. The second sticker might represent the number of part sprues, “2”, or it might be an “inspector” number. Sprue “A” has 14 parts and Sprue “B” has 19 parts, with a total of 33 parts making up the machine gun and wheeled carriage. All parts are clearly marked with an I.D. number that is an alphanumeric combination. For example, the gunner’s seat is on sprue B and is part #16 on that sprue. On the kit instructions the gunner’s seat is identified as “B16”. This makes part identification very simple, very easy, and very clear.