1:35 French FT 75 BS (including resin parts)

A small tank with a large barrel

The Renault FT changed the form of armored equipment: a rotating turret above the fighting compartment and the engine at the rear became the scheme tank design follows to this day. The version designated 75 BS, however, has no rotating turret. In its place it carries a fixed superstructure and in it a short 75 mm howitzer of the Blockhaus Schneider type, from which the abbreviation in the designation comes. The task of the machine was not a duel with other tanks but destroying fortified nests by direct fire from immediate range, where ordinary artillery would be of no service to the infantry. The order was generous, but by the end of the war only a fraction of the examples had been built and the machines saw service only in the post-war colonial campaigns.

How the kit is done

A combination of injection-molded plastic with resin parts is logical with a subject as intricate as this. Resin manages shapes which would either split an injection mold into too many pieces or be simplified by it, typically castings with undercuts and fine surface texture.

Before the build and during it

Resin sections call for a different procedure from plastic: they are cut off the casting block with a saw, washed and glued with super glue or two-part adhesive, because ordinary cement for styrene will not join them. Working with them belongs in a well-ventilated space and dry sanding is not recommended. Thanks to the size of the subject the resulting model is surprisingly small, which makes it a rewarding one for a smaller display case and for a diorama of a trench landscape, where it can be completed with figures of French infantry.