Parts

There are 122 kit parts including styrene, brass, Dragon Styrene 100 (DS 100) parts, and a clear styrene windshield for the Kubelwagen. There are 21 extra parts in the kit.

Review

Like the box says, you get two individual kits in this box. You get a mid-production zimmerit-covered Tiger and a Kubelwagen. There are also about half of the necessary parts to make a German motorcycle. Like most Dragon kits, the sprues are individually bagged. The parts really don’t have flash or ejection marks.

Each vehicle has one set of Cartograf decals. The directions are 3 pages front and back, with color and a parts map. Color call-outs are for Mr. Color and Testors paints.

While my review may look a bit nit-picky, I can tell you this: I’ve built a number of Tigers and Kubelwagens in the past from other manufacturers in this scale. None of them have the finite details and crispness that these two kits have.

Kubelwagen

The Kubelwagen took me 8 hours to build, with most of the time spent during the paint process. First off, I lost 2 parts of this kit to my dining room carpet. I lost the left front tow hook and the gas cap. I made a new tow hook from a small piece of wire and some reshaped sprue. I used the gas cap from the motorcycle as a replacement.

I only had 5 complaints with the Kubelwagen:

1. Part A15 (the hood) didn’t fit cleanly to part Z (the body).
2. Part A14 (rear deck and engine cover) didn’t fit cleanly to part Z. I used stretched sprue to fill in the gaps on both of these items.
3. The interior of the rear doors lacked detail.
4. Part C6 was to be placed on the interior of each door panel. It looks like a bungee cord cargo net type thing, but I couldn’t find one of these in any of my references. I placed them over the back doors to hide the lack of detail in that location.
5. A number of kit parts were made from the DS 100 material including the tires, door covers (mentioned above), convertible roof, mufflers, and exhaust pipes. I had a really difficult time cleaning the sprue tabs off of these parts. Sharp knives and files wouldn’t work.

Overall, I loved this little kit. I compared it to the Tamiya 1/48 Kubelwagen and these kits were identical except for the scale. I would recommend this kit to any intermediate modeler that has skills with small parts.

Tiger

It took me 14 hours to build this kit. Once again, most of the time was in the paint process. I only had 5 complaints with this kit, and none of them were serious issues:

1. Part A19 (back plate of the tank) didn’t fit well with the upper and lower hull parts. I used pieces of brass and stretched sprue to fill in the gaps.
2. This particular tank had a notek light in the middle of the glacis plate. Above the front fenders, wires and mounting hardware are present for headlights. I don’t believe that headlights were present on this version of the real tank, but I could be wrong.
3. This kit comes with preformed brass exhaust covers. I had to modify each one significantly with a motor tool to fit the kit.
4. Many German tanks have interleaved road wheels, and this tank is no different. Dragon simplified these interleaved road wheels by connecting them in groups of .
5. This design allows for proper alignment of the wheels, but painting wheels in groups of 4 is a bear.

Part F1 is the tow hook. This kit needed 4 and the modeler is provided with 8. I broke 5 and lost 1, so two of them are on the front of the kit. I would recommend removing the “mounting tabs” from the inside face of the tow hooks. With the mounting tabs on the tow hooks, you will break them every time you go to install them on the vehicle.

This tank was my first using the Dragon molded zimmerit. I loved it. I remember making zimmerit on a Hasegawa kit with Squadron green putty. The texture of my zimmerit wasn’t nearly as nice as what Dragon produced here. With the numerous brass parts on this tank, I would recommend it only to intermediate modelers or better. Tiny brass parts and little fingers usually lead to trouble. This is the nicest Tiger that I’ve built in this scale, and I have built a lot of them.

I would like to thank IPMS/USA and Dragon for this review sample. I really enjoyed building these little kits.