Upon receiving this kit in the mail, I looked over the artwork on the box top to see which paint scheme I thought would be cool to do. I noticed a camouflaged scheme that had a blue pattern. Immediately, I questioned the blue color. I checked the instructions and yes, there it was – sky blue color callouts. The other thing that I noticed, aside from the standard Dragon instruction, was there were nice decals, 23 grey sprues, 2 clear sprues, a PE fret, and 2 bags of magic tracks. The instructions show quite a few sprues with the majority of unused parts (which I included pictures of). I was still wondering a few days later which scheme to do. I was really intrigued by the sky blue scheme. At this point, I decided to post on Hyper scale about its validity. Tom Cockle, one of the technical consultants for this kit, shot me a reply saying no, it was a fake, and added this kit was missing a sprue C. Upon this, I contacted Dragon care and finally got my part around New Years. Well, first look at this kit says lots of old Shanghai sprues with newer ones added.

During construction, I ran into a few problems but managed to get through them. Here is what I found in the steps.

• Step 1: Part A43 and A42 flip-flopped, not a biggie. The only thing I found unbelievable was that of the 16 road wheels, 8 were heavy duty and 8 were standard. The 8 standard are 3 parts per, and have a molded rubber rim on them, very easy. These are the standard road wheels in most of the Panzer IV kits. The 8 heavy duty road wheels, on the other hand, have 7 parts per road wheel. They just took a long time for cleanup and assembly.
• Step 2: The main lower hull has a plastic nub on each side at the top.This need to be removed. If you don’t, the upper hull won’t fit later in step 15.
• Step 3: Part B1, rear hull, is incorrect for this kit but it will work. It just has a few accuracy discrepancies.
• Step 5: When attaching the idler wheel to the hull, you either have to sand part A40 to fit into housing B14 & B15 or bore out B14 & B15 to accept A40. The shaft is too thick to fit as molded. I chose to sand the shaft on A40.
• Step 6: The instructions call for fenders N1 and N2. They are wrong. These should not be used. Use part N28 and N29 respectively.
• Step 7: Attaching the front tow brackets to the hull requires attention. Part A27 must be glued to the lower hull so A32 and A33 fit. If you don’t use A27, you will see daylight bit enough to put a paintbrush through.
• Step 9: Part H56, fire extinguisher, has no tabs to line up to fit into the engine deck Part N1. H56 should have a male/female tab to mate with N1.
• Step 11: Fighting compartment roof. This set allows you to model hatches open or closed. Follow your choice carefully and look ahead at other steps to help you decide. Part MA33 poses problems later on.
• Step 12: Part G1 is the main cannon barrel, which is nice. This is a one-piece slide molded barrel.
• Step 13: This step shows mounting the interior MA42 part wc1a and wc1b for close defense. The problem is, there is nothing to mount it to, so I decided just to have the hatch closed. Glad I looked ahead.
• Step 14: When attaching the vehicle roof to the upper hull, the periscope on the cannon will not fit thru the hole in PE part Ma33. I had to remove it and go on. I replaced them later by cutting them off and inserting them down thru the outside.

That pretty much sums up construction of this kit. The only thing left was painting, and I still have not decided. Fast forward 3 weeks – I just said, what the heck, I’ll do a 3-tone camo. I hit the entire model with Tamiya XF60, then used Vallejo dark rubber and oily steel on the road wheels. I used incredible white mask liquid frisket to make dots on the yellow background. Then I used Tamiya XF61 dark green and XF64 dark brown to create thick stripes. Then, once the colors were dry to the touch, I peeled off the dots to gets my desired effect. I thought this kit would look good without decals, so I didn’t add them. No weathering will be done at this time. I want to try out some new AK interactive products on it to get it to a show in March.

I would like to recommend this kit if you want a good looking PZ L/70(A) in your collection. Just study the instructions before you build.

I would like to thank Dragon Models USA and IPMS-USA for the opportunity to review this kit, and you for reading it.