Breaking Your Dragon Virginity

Over the years I have noticed a certain progression in armour modellers, from easy scales to more challenging ones, and from easier builds to the more difficult. Dragon is a case in point, a company which from its inception some twenty years ago set out to find unprecedented detail levels through complex plastic engineering.

Many modellers call building your first Dragon kit 'breaking your Dragon virginity,' and it seems to be a somewhat accurate notion, but to be fair there is Dragon, and there is Dragon.

I have in fact already built two early Dragons, both Russian armour reboxed by Zvezda, and I was frustrated by a trend toward too many small parts and too few positive location devices. I did not really count these as they were from the company's first five years or so, and any firm goes through an evolution in approach and engineering.

I'm rating Dragons's StuG III Ausf. F/8, in the old Imperial Series, as my first genuine Dragon, and this is perhaps a less than perfect first choice as the Imperials are known for being both complex and, by many standards, over-thought. The object was to create the maximum number of variants from the same set of moulds, resulting in a huge number of parts in any box, with many sprues in common between kits and scores of parts unused on any particular project. For instance, though this is a Sturmgeschuts, there are enough parts to construct a Panzer III turret in the box, along with many other elements. My impression is that if I was to carefully inventory what unused parts I have and buy a batch of bits through Dragoncare (if they're available), I could more than likely build a Panzer III as well.

To look at the plethora of individually bagged sprues in the box is an impressive experience, then you start to build and inevitably compare the engineering with other firms and eras. The large number of parts is derived at least in part from tiny details being molded individually rather than as part of larger units, but as some variants have such details and some do not, you find either holes to open as locators (if you're lucky) or merely raised lines to indicate where the parts go. In any other context I would have rated the latter as very amateurish indeed, especially in view of the very high shelf price Dragon has always commanded. If you're paying the big bucks you expect less of a fight and better fit.

The superstructure is a case in point. Individual panels in the roof cater to the evolution of the StuG's fighting compartment so that a common core casting can be detailed for a number of marks, but the fit of those parts is far from great. While cast detail provides tight panel lines and rivet runs in some places, separate parts conjure gaps only an inch or two away which would have been fatal flaws in the real machine. Likewise, the engineering of the canon mount is weak, a multi-part structure to which the gun will glue at the end of assembly but which depends totally on the strength of your adhesive to hold the pivots in place in a friction-fit. I reinforced the assembly with strip styrene and superglue to be a bit more confident of the canon not simply falling out one day.

And what do you do when two parts are trying to occupy the same space? The instructions are not sufficiently explicit on assembly order, the way that details crowd around the superstructure and relate to the hull top, and a strip on the glacis (bullet splashguard?) which is supplied with a locator tab and slot was around 1mm too close to the superstructure for the frontal armour to fit. After filing and fiddling for a while I shrugged and ground away the strip's locating tab. It can lie 1mm forward of where it's supposed to be: no one will ever know the difference.

The Imperials did not necessarily venture into photoetch and I'll need to source engine grills for this one. Despite an inevitable negative comparison of Dragon in the 90s to Tamiya (of almost any era) when it comes to simple building pleasure, I would have to say this is going to be a good looking model on the shelf. Assuming I can conquer the individual track links... I've never tried before! I have a few other Imperials in my stash and now know what to expect, and look forward to building more recent Dragon engineering too.

I'll post a full review when this kit is finished. For now, I have some plastic to wrestle with...