Best 1/72 armor kit manufacturers

Yes, with over 3,500 kits and models of vehicles (military and civilian) databased in the ESM 72 files in 1/72-1/76 scale I guess that there are certainly are a number of them. :-)

Best of the lot are probably the ESCI kits, some are currently being re-issued by Italeri. Revell does some really good modern vehicles. Watch out for their WWII stuff as some are ex-Matchbox kits of varying quality. There are also tons of cast resin 1/72 vehicles out there of almost anything that you could want.

Tom

Revell of Germany - make sure it's their own kit. Anything and everything they have released as their own and new kit the last 3 or 4 years or so is superb. This includes a lot of modern tanks, but also the Panzer III and IV, and the Sturmgeschutz IV.

There are a few eastern European manufacturers who make excellent kits, such as Mirage - their 7TP and Vickers E are excellent. UM - a lot of very good WWII and earlier Soviet tanks.

Anders skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

The PST (?) Eastern Europe range is pretty good. They have multiple variants of items on the KV and T-34 chassis, and they are serious about what is required for a particular variant. This is important as WWII armor tended to be mix and match. Kim M

Operation American Freedom-Where is our regime change?

Yes RoG....but look on the side of the box, where it says what country it is made in, if it says Japan it is a reboxed Hasegawa, The best ones are made in Poland or Korea.

The Revell Stug IV is a piece of crap. I think single road wheels instead of doubles is more than enough to qualify any model of a vehicle based on the Pz III or IV chassis as garbage. It turned me off of Revell in a bad way and I refused to touch any of their kits for years. It was only after hearing here about the quality of some of their kits released after the Stug, that I started buying any of their new WWII kits such as the Tig I, Panther and Cromwell.

PST kits are nice and do fill out a nice range, but I find their kits are a nightmare to build. A lot of parts which must be drilled or forget it, brittle plastic with small things that break easily and (great for scratch builders) a huge number of redundant parts. Their ISU-122 and 152 kits, for example, all come with exactly the same parts but different directions and box art.

I have some pics of PST kits on my site (be nice, I'm a wargamer) at:

Anders, sorry if it seemed like I jumped on you my last post. It's just the Revell Stug was a big, big disappointment to me especially as my kids were so excited they'd found 4 of them to give Dad as a Christmas present a few years back. Here is a shot (I'm a wargamer, so don't nitpick) of one of them that illustrates the wheel problem:

I apparently typed a bit too fast, should have been Stug III, released this year to good reviews.

"Tim Marshall" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@Gunner.Sabot.Spam.On.Loaded.FIRE...

No problem.

Anders

Ron,

Check out my website. I have reviews of representative kits from every manufacturer currently producing 1/72nd scale AFV kits.

-Doug

-- Doug Chaltry "On The Way!" - 1/72nd Scale Armor Modeling on the World Wide Web.