The Tamiya Panzerkampfwagen I (Sd.Kfz 101) is presented in Tamiya typical rigid top opener with nice artwork depicting a unit from the 4^th Panzer Division, Poland, September 1939. Contents of the box are limited as this is of course a small kit.

This 100% newly tooled kit complements the existing 1/35 scale line up of German WWII vehicles in the Military Miniature Series and completes the lineup of main German tanks of WWII for Tamiya.

The box contains a normal Tamiya instruction manual with clear construction steps, 22 in all to complete this kit.

Also included is a glossy ‘background information’ leaflet which is a welcome addition and provides some history, design and deployment details of the Panzer I.

It also contains details of the specifications of this Light Tank including dimensions, crew capacity, engine (with speed and output) as well as range and armament.

The leaflet is presented in Japanese, English, French and German.

ICM continues to pump out new and interesting kits despite a war affecting all in the Ukraine, but especially in their home base in Kiev. This present reiteration of the original tooled Studebaker kit from 2007 (#35511) has new parts to make it into the U5 fuel truck specifically. This adds two tandem 375-gallon tanks with racks on the side to store a good number of 5-gallon Jerry cans. Let’s get into it…

What’s Inside the Box

You get six green plastic sprues- the four original sprues present in the earlier versions (A-D) and two copies of sprue E which contain the parts for the fuel tanks and their mounts, and the jerry cans. Sprue F is a clear sprue containing the windows, windshield, and headlight lenses. Decals include options for two nondescript schemes- one with a star and circle on the hood and one sans circle. No indication of where they were stationed but I suppose whenever fuel was needed to power machines of war would be fitting.

ICM Holding has put out a new model of their ZIL-131 truck with the addition of a Ukrainian Sapper Team. This is kit 35018 and is titled “Danger Mines!” Ukraine, Summer 2022. It is essentially a combination of their Sapper Team kit and their venerable ZIL-131 truck kit.

The box art for the kit is first rate and lends itself well to the actual truck and figures that are part of the kit. The box is compact and will fit well in any stash until you decide to build it. Although the box is small, the material within the box was not smashed together and no damage was noted when breaking out the materials from the box.

The Churchill Mk. VII is AFV Club’s 14^th entry in the line of Churchill tanks. Pretty much every variant you can think of has been produced by them. This kit is a dichotomy of both over engineering at times and at other times extreme simplicity.

The Build

Building this Mk.VII begins with a highly detailed engine and engine compartment, so if you want to have all the engine access hatches open you have something great to look at. That being said there is no other interior parts for the entire kit. I chose to keep the engine out and all hatches closed. Moving on body sides, forward gun mounts, and upper panels are added to the build. AFV Club has made this kit very modular due to the large number of variants for this tank. I did not find too many extra pieces but always double check as AFV Club doesn’t always pack everything into the box correctly.

These are a set of two Aftermarket BMW R75 Motorcycle spoked wheels. The R75 was a very popular motorcycle with eth German Army in WWII. These wheels can be used with most of the currently available model of the R75 on the market currently. I have a Master Box kit and used that as a comparison for the kit wheels and used in the final build using the UMM wheels.

The wheels look great and are far superior to the kit standard parts, although the kit did come with optional photo etch parts which would be a lot of work to use.

The second picture shows the Kit standard wheels with the UMM parts.

The final assembly is with the UMM parts.

I do highly recommend these aftermarket wheels as they are far better than the standard kit parts and I am sure better than the photo etch part build up.

Thanks go to UMM-USA for providing this book to review and IPMS USA for allowing me to review it for them.