Aya's Takom late Tiger 1,

[Aya]

Afternoon all,
Thought it was time to break my build duck. So we need another Tiger 1 i hear you say.... Yes I know, but I do enjoy loads of wheels. Anyway here is the box.

Made a start by fitting the rads and fans.
only to discover that the fuel tanks are too high and prevent the top deck sitting properly. As they cannot be seen once all closed up...off they came, also put together sprocket and idlers to check what the fit was like. Wheels next and then some interesting looking link and length tracks with a curious way of fitting guide horns??? More to follow, all comments welcome.

 

[Aya]

Afternoon chaps,
Got cracking on the link and length tracks last night. For anyone who has not seen these Takom kits here is a picture of their way of fitting the guide horns.



Gave it my best shot, but found after leaving them to dry overnight, when snipping off the sprue nubs, some of the horns pinged off. So I decided to go old school, I cut each horns from it's sprue bar cleaned them up and fitted each one individually, time consuming but actually I found it quite enjoyable. So that is one side finished but for a run of 9or 10 links to go around the idler, I think I have used the smaller of the Two provided so I guess it will be 9 in my case. Then on to the right hand side. I think I will be busy again tonight .

 

[Jakko]

TBH, I'm not surprised they came off when you tried to cut the sprue off. From having built a number of Takom kits in recent years, my conclusion is that nobody at that company is actually a modeller. If you follow their instructions to the letter picture, you'll be building subassemblies as if in a vacuum, that are somehow expected to fit perfectly on other subassemblies built in a vacuum … Last year, I tried following the assembly sequence for their M29 Weasel kit exactly per the instructions, and it's basically impossible to put the kit together that way. Like I said, this points to nobody there having even moderate hands-on experience building models — only in the computer.

Anyway, sawing off the sprue would probably work reasonably well, but with workable tracks like these, you'll get the track moving as you saw, which will complicate things a lot. Cutting them off first sounds like it was the best solution.

 

[Aya]

Hi Jakko,
Cheers mate for the info re: following their build sequence, think I will fit and build working up from bottom to top. As for the guide horns, I thought snipping them from the side and then cutting the sprue bar between the cut one and the next fixed one and so on but that didn't work either. So I am sticking to individual horns on the 2 other kits I have. . Thanks again Aya.