Soviet 45mm AT gun with crew

Zvezda has been releasing quite a number of simple and cheap kits over the last few months, mostly aimed at the wargaming community. This is one of them.
While it seems that some of these kits come in hard plastic, this one is definitely not one of those, as the plastic is soft (vinyl ?) and reacts badly to all kinds of glue. Superglue will hold the parts together, for as long as no force is applied. That said, the kit is engineered in a way that no glue is required.
Being a very simple model, assembly is extremely quick, and the manual and pictures on the boxtop are more than sufficient for the task at hand.

The two small sprues contain all the parts for the gun (even including optional parts for a gun in firing or in towing mode), two (mediocre) figures, a base, and a flag pole which - I guess - is solely for wargaming purposes. You also get a card and stats for the Art of Tactic wargame.

As far as I know, this gun, which is basically a scaled up version of Rheinmetal's Pak 36, came in two versions. While I have yet to discover the differences between the two models, it seems all guns had a carriage with spoked wheels, which the kit has not. Minor details also seem to be missing, but as I bought this gun to fit inside a bunker, only exposing the front, this was not an issue for me. In all, it captures the look of the real thing.

Due to the softness of the plastic it is very difficult to keep everything straight, but - surprisingly - the plastic holds paint quite well.

Article Last Updated: 23 April 2012