Italian Tank Carro Armato M13/40

I built the older, original 1974 issue of the M13 40. What I like about the older Tamiya kits is that they were able to capture the detail and accuracy of the actual item with engineering that doesn’t make you go crazy. The instructions are logical and easy to follow. I quickly counted and came up with about 122 parts. This would be an excellent starter kit for anyone, if you can find one. I think that Tamiya would find a good market in re-releasing these older kits as is. I would sure buy some!

If your looking for a weekend project that will not break the bank this is it. Tamiya did a good job when they revamped this kit along with the Italian M40 SPG. For starters you get a nice metal barrel, the decals have been improved. You can now model a captured Australian model, along with more than enough unit markings for the Italian version. Tamiya learned how to count, which if you built the older kit you will have noticed that the u-bolts only had 2 nuts and washers. now it is correct with 4 when you place part x19. As always with Tamiya the directions are clear and in order, most plastic parts are well detailed and easy to remove. Of course there is a little bit of clean-up, parting lines and a few ejector pin marks. But over all it is not to bad. The kit figures are rather generic, but work if you do not want to spend money on after market fig's. Tamiya gives only 2 options for painting. The first is for a North African model, the second is for a Ausie model. Though this leaves the door open for different paint versions. one way is to paint this model in just the Olive green color and you have a model that would have been used in say Greece... A little home work will give you a lot of useful info as far as that goes. A word on paint. You can buy after market paint for this kit, but when I painted mine with Tamiya's basic 2 color paint job for the North African front 132nd Ariete Division it looked just fine. Or if you do not have the colors you can paint it the basic sand color. So if you want something a little different this is it, and it is easy and fun to build.