British Mk.VI Crusader Mk.III Cruiser Tank

This Tamiya kit is part of their Italeri series where they take older Italeri molds, correct errors, add details and pack them in new boxes with some extra Tamiya goodies. This Italeri kit first hit the market in 1976. Tamiya has taken these old molds and added turret and hull weld seam. They also corrected the front fenders by taking a molded-in step out of them, updated the moldings on the turret tool box, added details to the underside of the hatches, hollowed out the spotlight and included a thin, plastic lens. Two Tamiya figures are included from their Churchill Mk. VII kit, # 35210, from 1996, and a sprue from the British Infantry on Patrol weapons, kit #35223, from 1999. New decals offer two marking options from the Tunisia Campaign go along with the new instruction sheet in typical Tamiya multi-page, fold-out design. This kit comes with three sprues of tank parts, one sprue with the vinyl-like tracks, the figure sprue and the weapons / equipment sprue. The tracks are a one-piece rubber band style and have a lot of raised knockout pin marks on the inside, along with some flash on the edges. They are also too long. Sprue A was molded about 1/16 on an inch off-center, so there will be a lot of clean up on these parts. The road wheels from this sprue were not too bad, but on the smaller pieces, it caused some problems. The other two sprues had some flash and heavy seams on parts. I think about half my time building this tank was just cleaning up these mold seams. I can tell the original molds are over 40 years old. The lower hull is one piece and was warped a little and causes a slight problem later installing the upper hull. The part numbers on the sprues are not in order. Usually a sprue's numbers will start in the upper left and go sequentially, but not on these three sprues. It looks like Tamiya renumbers them because you can see a block over the old number and the new number is a lot thinner and smaller. This causes a lot of hunting around on sprues for a part. I found it easier to look for the part by its design, not by its number. This renumbering also gets in the way of cutting the parts off and makes some of the gates much larger than normal. My sprue cutters would not fit in this smaller space, so I had to cut parts off with a hobby knife or thin saw.