Yeah, that UFO was in the shop where I got the tank
Then again, those shops are like... concentrations of raw eccentricity, its tiny, cramped, and theres dusty boxes of assembly sets stacked tall as a man
When I went to pay, the dude started writing stuff down in a note pad with a pencil, meaning - if you have a good old eccentric hobby shop nearby, there's no knowing what might actually be there, some boxes may have been gathering dust for the past 30 years
(we have two shops in the city, both are owned by some super aspie hobby eccentric (as in, two shops, two owners, but they're both eccentrics... ). I prefer one out of the two, simply because in the other, my brother and dad were litterally interrogated by the store owner, who was reluctant to sell them a basic motor. He apparently refused to believe they had adequate plans for the motor, and wanted "proof" that they knew what they were doing. Eccentric beyond... )
Well, this turned out to be a massively dissapointing piece of shit
My previous tanks were all Revell, lesson: Stick with Revell
A piece here, a piece there, would not fit where intended, and I had to shave off plastic again and again, to have pieces actually fit. I kept tolerating it cus shaving off some plastic isn't that big a deal. There were some instances of heavy residue though, from when the plastic is molded, where rims and lumps can appear. Some of these were quite hefty, and required a bit of muscle work to cut the fuck off. By then I begun to wonder if these people had actually tested the kit before shipping out for sales...
Some pieces begun whitening (the structural integrity of the plastic worsening, the moment before it snaps in half) if I tried to force them in place - just in case they just needed more brute force. Once I knew that any more physical force would break the plastic itself, I'd opt to shave and cut off, to make it fit.
Finally, a prominent piece, the hood of the tank, is mis-matched by a full millimetre and a half. Doesn't sound like much, but it is. Not only over a millimetre too big to fit, but also slightly deformed, so if one corner fit, the opposite would sprawl out of place, and attempting to force it in place would put the plastic piece under constant stress. I had to cut off a whole edge of this piece, in order to re-size it to fit. Now it's re-sized, but still does not match the shape its supposed to rest against, so theres gaping fucking gaps all over the place, and the stress is making one of the corners lift up from the drying glue. I can't put weights on it, because according to the instructions I've had to attach thin, fragile pieces on both sides of the larger piece.
I'm hoping the turret and other features will be prominent enough to sort of camoflage the utter failure of other parts of it, but I'm having serious doubts that these mis-fitting pieces will be rare flukes. I've seen guides online with this very model, and they seem to have had no problems, except for some comments regarding the hood, which I find weird. They do mention, though, that the exact models seem to "evolve", that from time to time, their exact layout and plan will change with some details. Could be some of these pieces have been - for whatever reason - tweaked and redesigned, and that I've gotten a dysfunctional model that it's only a matter of time before gets redesigned again, due to it not fucking working.
