What Price Detail?

First of all, an apology: this post was written months ago and it simply slipped my mind that I had not posted it! Life has been both busy and fraught and even on the brightest side I have been more concerned with building models than blogging about them. Nevertheless, this blog is alive and well and here are two posts on the same day to make up for the long silence! So, without further ado:

We usually think of detail, and detail accuracy, as being rather the holy grail of the hobby. How faithful has a manufacturer been to the original subject? Have the fine details been captured? How well? Surely a kit that captures details others have missed must be a good one, and when there are many of them, it must be the preferred starting point.

That was my perhaps naïve outlook when I started Trumpeter’s old (2000 or so) kit of the M1A1HA tank. I used Vodnik’s site to compare the major brands and how well they had captured the fine details, and in almost every instance Trumpeter was well ahead, featuring a wealth of small details that I have in the past scratchbuilt onto Tamiya M1s to “complete the picture.” Some of them are details I have never attempted, such as the sides of the lower hull with their intricate bolt detail and what appear to be laminations of plate. The Trumpeter offering featured many moulded-in items the others do not, and the lower price was an added incentive.

The fact is, the lower price should also have been a warning, because this was perhaps the least friendly armour kit I’ve built in a while. I can safely say it fought me at every step, there are elements that were never going to line up, and for all its vaunted details, there were elements which were missed or improperly represented, so if accuracy was the goal there was still building to do on top of the battle royal that was the price of the details to start with.

Many would say this it is a good thing to be challenged, and I would agree. Certainly the construction sequence was different from what I’m used to, necessitated by the skirt armour being moulded in with the upper hull. This meant that the running gear and lower hull must be completed before the upper hull is mated, and this gave rise to the interesting process of, essentially, laying on the main paint scheme before the model was finished. When the top hull was snugged down over the lower and fixed in place, I simply touched up the camouflage scheme with a few spots through the airbrush and called it good. I make that process sound simple, but there was a great deal of filing and fiddling, of cutting with a razor saw and other adjustments to get the hull to join at all.

The proof of the model is in the viewing, I guess, and it sure looks like an Abrams. All that fancy detail behind the running gear is invisible, of course, and I still had to scratch a detail or two, and only realised after I was done that I’d missed one or two others that would have been easy to add at the right time. The doors of the main sight don’t fit, the lifting lugs on the rear hull should have been replaced with wire, the bustle rack and turret racks overall were warped and were a pain to get even as straight as they are… The rack outer face is sloping inward, which was not apparent until the tact board and stowage boxes were attached. I used these same parts on another model long ago and they behaved much better that time.

The decals, while quite glossy, were very thin and reacted well to Microscale chemistry, snugging down to the surface without complaint, and as such were one of the few elements of this kit that worked as intended. The non-slip texture moulded in is also excellent, but that’s about it for the compliments. The running gear is secured with central caps which did not fit the shafts they were meant to go over, neither in length nor width. I filed the axle stubs to get them into place but nothing would ever get them to sit down that extra couple of millimetres to where they actually looked like the real thing. As a matter of fact, almost no pin was ever the right size to enter a socket anywhere on this kit, including the main sockets that joined the hull, so it was always a matter of modifying and filing. It fought me to the bitter end, with the radio masts and tow cables, to the extent that I really did not care by then whether the details I was mounting were correct or not, so long as they were finished.

Trumpeter have come a long way since this kit, which was in their “middle era” of engineering. Today their new-tool products are world class, and their Hobby Boss subsidiary is right up there with Tamegawa in terms of crispness of moulding and accuracy of assembly. It all had to start somewhere, and this M1, while dated in its approach, was far from their first product even so. I look forward to a retool at some point, or even an M1 showing up in their 1:16^th scale armour series, which would be majorly impressive.

This particular outing was an education in many ways, and I would have to say that I’m happy enough with the result. Tamiya Acrylics, Mig pigments, scratchbuilt radio masts and a steady hand on the decals, and she looks good in the line up with the others. Heck, for $7 direct from China, perhaps I really shouldn’t complain!