The Little World

Remember that great nostalgia we got before the war – it always fried up crispy and you could go from here to Sydney on it for 17 shillings…

Well, I never went to Sydney for 17 shillings, but I did go to Don’s Hobby Shop in Calgary on Saturday mornings and spent my pennies on Airfix, Aurora, and Monogram kits. And, quite frankly, they were not as good as this IBG offering from Warsaw.

They were cruder than today’s standards of moulding, they were packaged bare in flimsier boxes, and there were no photo-etch sheets, resin details, or extensive instruction booklets. We were left to assume our own colour schemes based upon the box art or old copies of National Geographic. We never got 4 pots of paint, a full-sized tube of glue and a good paintbrush in the box as well. I am prepared to throw nostalgia out the window and embrace the good new days.

Sprue trees look clean, with only the barest of flash on the odd part. None of the ejector positions show on the outside. In modern fashion, there are no locating pins and sockets, but they would be an intrusion if they were there. I shall be able to align better without them.

The tracks are moulded as part of the road and sprocket wheels and will depend upon painting for definition – I thoroughly approve of this but will apply to my scale model club mates who do armour for some hints. They build their models in various finishes, but I’ll want the clean version. I will also do internet research to see if there is a preserved example of this anywhere.

One good sign – the front of the IBG box has a logo and endorsement from the Polish Army Museum. If they’ve got one, the mould makers should have been able to get a good pattern.

Postscript: There is a repro one in Poland – it is on the net being loaded onto a truck for an Army Day exhibition. It’s the colour call-out scheme so this can be built SOOTB.