MK72(MPK)

Kübelwagen Sandreifen

Kit # 7307

Preview by Rob Haelterman - heman_148(at)hotmail(dot)com

This set contains five resin wheels which are meant to replace those that come with the Academy, Hasegawa or Italeri kits. Both the Academy and Hasegawa wheels are underscale, while the Italeri wheels are rather rough, slightly overscale and hollow on the inside. Both have a rather heavy thread pattern. (See pictures below.)

These wheels represent a very common type of wheel for Kübelwagens in the North African theatre of operations. Indeed, the majority of Kübels seen in the desert sand were equipped with these high flotation tyres, which were unavailable to Braille scale modelers until this release. These wheels scale out at 9.4mm diameter.

Casting is near perfect, with only one pin hole found on a tyre face. Detail on the hubs is very crisp. The tyre thread is rather shallow, but to be honest, the real tyre thread on these balloon tyres was also very indistinct. My point is that you might want to take care with the paintwork if you don't want it to disappear entirely.
The way the wheels are attached to the casting blocks avoids the loss of too much detail as the small "flange" only covers the centre of the tyre. In this way you will only need to rescribe the center of the tyre thread pattern, which for these tyres is an easy job.

Two wheels are marked "K1", two "K2", and one "KR". The latter clearly is the spare wheel, but it is unclear to me what the difference between "K1" and "K2" is.

Above: Academy

Above: Italeri

(A picture of the Hasegawa wheels was not available at the time of writing.)

Thanks to MK72 for the review samples.

Article Last Updated: 29 August 2011