Tamiya Somua S35

As I've only got two builds on the go at the moment and I have the breaking strain of a wet kitkat I decided last night to start on this bad boy! It's an absolute cracker of a kit and I was going to do an in box review but as you will see on the web everyone loves it and rightly so. The kit is pure tamiya class with excellent details, logical assembly and very well researched. 

I particularly like the cast texture on the hull parts, it's perfect in my humble opinion and I think other manufacturers should really take note of what tamiya continually achieve regarding surface textures. I started last night and I must say building it is a breeze. The suspension areas do have a few knock out pin marks and the springs have some seam lines BUT unless you plan on leaving off the skirts and covers here nothing will be seen later on.

In fact the suspension units have some smashing bolt detail which is hidden so I decided to shave these off and use them on other projects as it seemed a shame to waste them. You can see the bolts on the rear unit below.

   
And with the shields on voila! it's all hidden, this is the first model in ages were I haven't spent time cleaning up suspension parts.

As you would expect it all builds up very quickly with no dramas. The upper and lower hulls mate superbly held in place with a couple of poly caps. And again that super cast texture is very much in evidence.

So after only a couple of hours work it's coming together very quickly indeed. I'm very pleased tamiya released this kit as I built the Char B when that first came out and thought that was something special. As for any additions I can only see a couple of areas that may get a bit of tweaking, those being the straps on the stowage bins and an armoured cover on the drivers station. The figure supplied in the kit is also very nice so I will even be using that as well.