Parts fit is generally poor and you’ll spend the vast majority of your time cleaning up and doing test fitting. There are three areas that need special attention.
First is the fit between the upper and lower portions of the body halves. Take extra time here and you’ll eliminate the need for major amounts of filling and sanding. In my case after all my test fitting I still needed some filling around all of the fender areas.
The next concerns the middle set of dual wheels. The way the suspension is set up for these pretty much guarantees that they will not touch the ground. Some extra work is needed here to avoid this. The suspension arms for the wheels attach to a box like structure (transfer case?) that attaches to the middle of the underside of the body. I kept the sanding of this box structure to a minimum so that it would sit a bit lower to the ground than what it appears to be intended. When it came time to mount the wheels I did the corner wheels first and then the middle sets afterwards. Even my best effort here still required me to ream out the holes in the rims just a bit larger to allow the wheels to shift down a little to allow them to touch the ground.
The last problem area is with the turret. Because it is made up of four parts – base, left and right sides and top, which compounded with the poor fit, makes putting this together a challenge. I had to bend the top front of the turret to increase the slope to get a better fit with the sides.
The kit comes as the radio command version with the bed frame antenna. The decals are for ADGZ number 20433 – for which I found four pictures of on the web. I wanted to model an ADGZ that didn’t have the bed frame antenna as I much prefer the cleaner brutish look of the ADGZ without it. Searching the web I found two images of an ADGZ in German Polish campaign markings and decided to do my ADGZ in similar fashion.
To get the look I wanted and to copy the reference pictures as much as possible I performed the following modifications:
1. Sanded off the poor door handles that were cast to the body and added scratchbuilt replacements made from thin slices of plastic rod and short sections cut from some heat stretched sprue.
2. Added door hinges from pieces of heat stretched sprue (appx. 2mm each in length)
3. The cooling doors in the front were just molded as lines in the panel. I opened up the panel and added slats in the open position from plastic strip.
4. Drilled out the turret gun barrels and the exhaust pipe outlet.
5. Scribed the missing lines for the engine louvers in the back.
6. Added a jack from the spares box to the front left fender.
7. Shovels come as a set of two molded together. I cut off the extra shovel and mounted it to the front of the vehicle.
8. Added a set of jerry cans to right rear fender. These were added just ‘cause I wanted. They don’t show in my reference pictures, but I saw some on other ADGZs, so they were added to give some visual interest to the model. I hollowed out the jerry can handles and scratch built a box for them to fit into and added a strap from left over from an etched brass frame.
The kit was sprayed overall with Testors Model Master Panzer grey and weathered with Model Master RLM66 dark grey and Aeromaster Earth Brown enamels.
The white cross markings came from the spares box.
All in all this is a kit that makes into a reasonable representation of the ADGZ but it will take a lot of work and some patience to transform this crude lump into something less lumpish. If this kit is representative of what Ace produces then I for one will probably not buy another Ace kit. I have lots of other subjects to build that will most definitely be a lot easier to build.
Al Magnus
E-mail to Henk Timmerman / HenkofHolland