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[crookedmouth]

Churchill Mk III Turret Interior
1:35 Inside The Armour (ITA35005)

The kit is intended for the AFV Club Churchill Mk III (AFV Club 35153) and weighs in at £35 at the time of writing.

I’ll be starting off with an in-the-box review and will then move on to a build & paint in a later instalment.

To start with, I’ll be looking at the content of the kit and the quality of the parts. The ease of construction and value for money of the kit will come later, once it’s been road tested.

One big caveat to start off - if I sound a little faint in my praise, please bear with me. I’ve never worked with an AM kit of this sort or scale before and this is quite a learning experience for me. It also means that I have little else to compare this particular kit with. So, hang on through the review and build, by which time I expect to have formed a much fuller opinion of the kit and, hopefully you can make up your own mind too.

Off we go...

The kit arrives in a nice sturdy box – so sturdy in fact that it took me some time to break in. The parts inside take up very little room, so the spare space is packed out with polystyrene wotsits.

Inside we find a small plastic bag containing the resin parts. As you can see, they come in much the same form as you would expect of a set of resin parts. The quality looks good with no obvious defects or bubbles. To my untrained eye, some of the parts seem a little less “regular” than one might expect from a commercial styrene set. Not much and only in some of the parts, so I don’t expect that to be a problem considering that they will end their days inside a model tank. I also guess that if I was scratchbuilding the interior, I’d be happy to accept a lot more “roughness” than this.

There are 48 parts (variously alone or attached in threes or fours to single pour blocks) including ammunition stowage, radios, a replacement turret ring and basket/floor, a new gun breech, some sundry furnishings and a number of small parts such as ammunition pouches, a pistol holster and the like. The finesse of the detail is good with, for instance, the buckles on the pouches and holster and the dials on the radio set being represented nicely. Again, the detail is not up to commercial kit standards but seems quite adequatte to me.

The next item is a photoetch sheet – probably the largest one that I’ve ever seen. However, the majority of these parts are required only for the full interior (turret and hull ITA 35001) kit which is a shame (or a blessed relief) because they look impressively fiddly. The quality looks absolutely fine here, quite up to the quality of the PE sheets I’ve encountered in commercial kits.

Finally, another plastic bag with some wire and a couple of styrene rods. The wire will be used to simulate.... well... wires. The rods will be used as the turret basket pillar and a seat pedestal.

The instructions come on three sides of A4. The front page includes three photos of the completed kit.

Having had a peek at the construction instructions, I have a feeling that these photos (and the ones to be found on the Britmodeller ITA thread) will come in handy.

The instructions come in seven steps and if I’m honest, they leave a little to be desired in the detail department. I guess it would be unfair to expect CAD drafted diagrams, but what with the (understandable) lack of resin part numbers and the disparity between the appearance of the diagrams and the actual parts, sorting out what is what and which goes where may prove tricky. Perhaps things will become clearer as the build progresses. We shall see.

Possibly the most glaring omission is the lack of a painting guide. This points very clearly to a need to do your own research or (my preferred option) to make hefty use of artistic licence, or both. However, I would have thought that some basic notes could have been included.

Overall Impressions

I’m generally ambivalent about AM detailing kits, especially for model interiors. That is as much a reflection of my skills and aspirations as a modeller as a commentary on the market for such items: the closest scrutiny any of my models will ever get is a loving glance from me and a casual one from the occasional visitor to my study. To spend time and money on something that will disappear inside a tank (or aeroplane) and possibly never be seen again seems a little frivolous to me.

However, I also admit to getting a great deal of pleasure out of all that fiddliness and that is, in some respects, its own reward. Still, if you are intending to show your models, then the value of a kit of this sort is something only you can decide upon. In the round, it certainly looks to me like it will add immeasurably to the pleasure of the build process and the quality of the finished model.

Despite my reservations about the quality of the instructions (and that is something that can be fixed easily enough) I’m pretty sure that you’ll end up with and AFV Club model that is a good deal better than the manufacturer had originally intended.

[crookedmouth]

OK, so it’s been a while since I posted the box review, having promised to show the build. Sorry other things have intervened, but here I am now.

Preparation

The ITA kit uses some, but not all of the AFV Club turret components: you’ll need the barrel, turret body, front plate, mantlet and mantlet hinge plates, and of course the external components, but you can discard the breech and turret base (although you may want to hold on to the latter – more later). So, I constructed most of the AFV Club turret components – the main hull, stowage box, periscopes, hatch lids and a couple of other external fitments ready for the ITA extras.

I decided at his stage to paint the interior silver. This seems to be the correct colour according to this site, but on reflection (no pun intended) I wish I had painted it white. The silver, while apparently correct, really shows up every minor imperfection in the build and looks quite horrible. A matt white interior would have been more forgiving.

The instructions

After some thought and some false starts, I pretty much abandoned the instructions. As I had suspected, they provide a little assistance but are, I’m afraid, too poor to be much more than a guide. The components are depicted quite roughly and it’s difficult (in some cases very difficult) to identify the components from their drawings. The suggested build sequence seems all wrong, with a diagram of the turret kit stowage coming at the end of the leaflet, after the turret base has been attached.

The most logical sequence seems to me to be:
1. Turret equipment
2. Gun, mantlet and breech
3. Turret base
4. Turret basket, basket equipment and seating

It was also useful (invaluable) to refer to the photographs on the Britmodeller ITA thread and also the Maple Leaf Up website. I only found out about this site after I completed the build and I suspect that it'll be even more useful.

Build

I won’t go through this step by step as, once you work out the build & paint sequence and the kit arrangement, it’s generally simple. Be warned, though, it’s not just a matter of cut out and stick on. There’s a fair bit of fettling required in order to get one or two of the components to fit. For instance, it’s necessary to trim the turret base where it meets the rear end of the turret. This is clearly signalled in the instructions, fortunately. You’ll also find that the rear stowage rack and radio need some work to get them to fit between the roof and base.



There’s some PE to go onto the radio and stowage rack and, having fixed these components to the turret hull, I jumped to adding the rest of the bits & pieces to the turret hull interior. Again, the instructions are quite vague here and in fact seem to omit one or two components entirely. Here you can see several shots of the turret kit attached. I added a couple of little details of my own, just to amuse myself – the smoke gun and the dome lights, both manufactured from various sprue scraps. I added some wiring: some of the stuff that came in the kit and some larger gauge scrap copper wire. The fine stuff in the ITA kit may or may not be to scale but it looked too fine – hence my own additions.




The completion of the gun breech should have been a simple task, but even here, the instructions let you down. There is a choice between two gun elevation mechanisms and I chose the early “free” type. With four parts, this should have been trouble free, but there is a horseshoe shaped component which attaches to the side of the breech. There is absolutely no clue how this goes and it only became evident by checking the ITA photos that there is a “mystery part” attached to the same pour block that acts as the interface between the breech and horseshoe. Even here, though, there is a bit of artistic license in my engineering.




Of course all of this needs to be painted before you close down the turret. As far as I can tell, silver remains the order of the day, with the exception of some khaki for the flare pistol holster and some pouches. Some finer detailing can be done as well, but don’t forget that your visibility of this stuff will be severely limited.

The turret base doesn’t fit well into the aperture in the tank hull. I spent some time thinning down the turret ring and opening up the hull aperture but I don’t think I ever managed to get a good fit. I wonder if it might be possible to use the AFV Club component here instead of the ITA base. It would need some fettling, but it might work, and a perfect fit with the hull would at least be assured.

The basket actually turned out to be simpler than I was expecting and it all fitted together very well. There are a few bits and pieces to add here, including the seats and some stowage and once this is done, it’s finished!





(I'll close this review off soon with some final thoughts)

[crookedmouth]

Last words

First off, please try to separate my rather poor attempt at a build from the kit itself. The more I look at it the less justice I think I've done it and, if you want a good idea of how it should come out like, try this - it's not the same kit but the hand of the creator can definitely be detected!

The quality of the parts - mixed PE, resin and other media - is generally good, but the fit of the turret ring with the hull caused me some serious problems and it will need some careful work if you are to mate the turret to the hull successfully. Apart from that, and ignoring the problems caused by the instructions, this is actually simple affair with little requirement for advanced techniques or careful fitting.

The instructions do let the kit down. Prime needs are: a parts list; a reworked build sequence; a series of photos covering the build; and a painting guide. A historical precis would also be nice and might round off the sheet. None of these deficits should worry the experienced builder but I would suggest that revised set of instructions would open this kit up to less experienced, resourceful or skillful builders.

Overall, the kit was fun to build and I can see how, in expert hands, it will add a lot to the satisfaction of the build and the final model. However, I suspect that it would be worth considering whether you should actually go for the full interior. The only way to really enjoy the turret guts is to take it out, thus revealing a grey-green plasticky hole in the main hull, which is just begging to be filled with something other than paint splashes and plastic shavings.

Value for money? Well, I'm a half Scot and I have an exacting attitude when it comes to the word "value". I suspect then that it would be best to let you make that judgement for yourself, based on what you expect to get out of the kit. Best of luck!

Thanks to ChrisITA for the kit.

Edited by crookedmouth, 30 March 2010 - 12:25 PM.