This is a great kit that Dragon has produced and it’s a joy to assemble!

Background

The Opel Blitz Maultier (“Mule”) platform was developed in 1942 to deal with the lack of paved roads on the Eastern Front in Russia, and was produced until 1944. An Opel Blitz wheeled truck chassis was modified by replacing the rear drive wheels with caterpillar tracks. The Maultier half-track Sd. Kfz.3 chassis was used with a cargo truck bed, antiaircraft gun mount, and truck bodies used for offices, workshops, & the Maultier ambulance.

Dragon has produced a previous Sd.Kfz.3a Maultier Half-Track kit, #6761 with a cargo truck body. Testors, Revell, and Italeri have also produced kits of the Opel Maultier with a cargo body in 1:35 scale.

• Tents & Tarps Set #5, VG-005, $11.50
• Tents & Tarps Set #11, VG-011, $11.50
• Sherman Engine Deck Set #4, SH-004, $15.00

Value Gear out of Ireland continues to add to its list of quality aftermarket armor accessories, featuring plastic representations of tents, tarps, backpacks, crates – just about anything you might find piled high on a busy AFV, or anywhere else for that matter.

Their website is intuitive and easy to navigate. The home page describes Value Gear's Goal:

The Value Gear idea is to give model builders (me included) a more useful spares box! Creating and casting sets of Generic/Universal stowage. No helmets no weapons and nothing to keep you from using it in a wooden cart, a chariot, a truck, or a Panther tank. "Any Army, Any Era!" is my motto… the Army lives under canvas!

Background

The Leopard 2A6/A6M is the newest of all currently fielded German Leopard tanks. This kit is one of three current Revell 35th scale Leopard tanks on the market. The other two kits available from Revell the Leopard 2A4/A4NL and the Swedish Leopard 2 (Strv 122A/122B).

Kit

The Leopard 2A6/A6M comes in the standard Revell end-opening box. Quite frankly, the box is a little too small for all of the plastic inside; more on this later. The 222 parts come in three separate bags on seven sprues molded in the standard Revell green plastic and black vinyl tracks. In addition, there is a piece of fine wire taped to the front of the instruction booklet. The 19 page instruction booklet is easy to follow but be forewarned that in the early steps the instructions already show some parts in place. These parts are labeled, but could be easy to overlook.

The Churchill Mk.IV NA 75 was a variant of the Churchill Mk.IV British tank, its main difference being that it mounted a 75mm main gun from the Sherman family of tanks rather than the Churchill’s six-pounder. Besides the main gun, the Besa coaxial and bow guns were replaced with Browning .30 caliber weapons. Some minor changes to the roof of the ‘standard’ Mk.IV turret were made to accommodate the new main gun.

The Box

The kit comes in the typical 6”X10” box that you get with 1:72 Dragon armor kits: the two-part variety that comes with a lid, rather than the dreaded opening end flaps. There’s a nice painting of an NA75 on the box top with kit information panels adorning the sides.

The Kit

Dragon’s kit is in keeping with much of its 1:72 offerings: clean, crisply molded flash-free parts in a light gray styrene in a fairly easy to assemble motif. This basically means low parts count and more molded on or integral details.

Ever since I was a young lad, and would pass construction and road works sites while out driving or walking with my Father, I have loved bulldozers. Big, yellow and Caterpillar! Yet whenever I went to try and build a model of one, I always struck out. The only kit I could ever find of a Caterpillar product in injection plastic was a 1/25th scale kit, which was either too expensive for me as a young hobbyist, or the wrong scale once I got a job but moved on to focus on modeling military subjects in 1/35th scale. This year, however, Meng Models from China, a relatively new player in the model kit industry, has hit the ground running and provided the 1/35th scale military modeler with an amazingly detailed injection model of the mighty Caterpillar D9R armored bulldozer. Read on!