Building the Zvezda Katyusha BM-13

Having spent last weekend building and painting a towns worth of 28mm buildings I decided to take it easy and give the Zvezda 1/100 scale kits a try. I was interested in the BM-13 in particular as I had a great deal of difficulty with the Battlefront model that I had attempted. As noted earlier the Zvezda kit is a snap-together model and is very cleanly cast. I decided to start with the part that had given me the most trouble before, the launch-rails and elevation frame. This went together like a dream, despite being made of four tiny parts. The fit was perfect and the parts snapped cleanly into place (I glued them anyways).

the frame and elevation post

be careful to push the frame tips all the way trough the launch-rails

 the pins pop out the top and form the locators for the rockets

Still More from Zvezda 1/100 or 15mm Katyusha, BT-5 and SDKFZ 251

Just in from the fine folks at Michigan Toy Soldier three new items from the prolific Zvezda.

Yet again the fine folks at Zvezda have provided gamers with more tasty morsels in the form of a BM-13 Rocket Launcher (more commonly known as a Katyusha) a BT-5 light tank and a German SDKFZ 251 halftrack. These are up to the usual standards with rivets and lug-nuts crisply cast on all of the vehicles. At 26 pieces the BM-13 is probably pushing the limit on snap-tight models but I care little as I will be gluing mine together. The pictures will speak for themselves so I will stop now.

Building Zvezda 1/100 T-34

I had just a few moments of free time so I thought that I would build some Zvezda kits. The T-34 That I reviewed earlier was first up. As expected it went together like a dream, needing only a tiny amount of mold-line clean-up. I glued the parts together as I have never trusted Snap-Together models to hold in the long run.

Five parts, that is it!

The small details that make these kits a joy to build, somebody at Zvezda is thinking and making life easy for the rest of us.