Managed to complete this kit a few weeks back. Not my greatest build ever, but it was at least entertaining. The kit was first released in the mid '60s by Aurora, one of the few ‘modern’ pieces in their 1/48 armor lineup. It was reissued by Atlantis last year.
It’s an okay, but not great kit. Main drawbacks are a poor .50 cal, which is a prominent feature right on top of the turret, so it catches your eye. And not in a good way…another major ‘miss’ is the lack of anything close to the recoil spade system on the rear. A prominent feature that Aurora missed somehow. The two versions of the M109 in the kit are seriously outdated compared to the current operating version. The kit goes together well though, and it’s unlikely anyone else will ever produce a 1/48 M109, so this is what you have to work with.
Looks good. I have a pair of them from decades ago. The original version with just the short tube and vacuformed base and a 70s white box version with the two guns and some external engraving.
These kits were okay back in the 60s and 70s, but I think the Revell 1/40th ones were superior model kits. But I loved them.
The Atlantis reissue has the longer barrel for the M109A1 also. The vac bases have probably disappeared into the dustbins of history. I did the best I could with the decals provided. There weren’t enough stars, and I doubt the registration numbers were yellow… I chose this earliest version, as there’s a nice couple minute clip of this very early version in action on YouTube -
Those bases were the best. I remember the towed gun had a fire base for the kit. It was cool. As a kid, I didn’t know the difference between an SPG and a tank.
Occasionally you see the square boxes with the bases on places like eBay, but they’re pretty scarce now. Most of the times it’s just earlier or later boxings without it. The only Aurora kit I still have is a last issue white box, still sealed MBT-70.
I have several of the MBT70s, most with the base, one in a white box sealed and another is the young model builder club version in the mailer box. It was one of my inspirations to become a tanker.
I remember and loved those vacuformed bases. I have a few Aurora kits in the stash but unfortunately they’re ships and aircraft. When I was a kid I remember getting the Aurora King Tiger and in the commalender’s hatch they had a viewers’ scope so if you took the turret off of the hull of the tank and held it up to a light, you’d see an explosion scene!
As a follow up to my last post I looked on Scalemates and it was called a "photo scope ". I don’t know if they included it with any other armor kits other than their King Tiger.
There was an issue of the Aurora Skipjack submarine that had the photo scope feature as well; in place of the reactor parts was a sub interior photo. Monogram later reissued the Skipjack kit, but without this ‘feature’ !
I must be a little bit younger. Aurora had already failed when I started building kits, but you’d still hear people talk about them, or read about it in a hobby magazine. I mostly had to settle for the reboxes Monogram did. But that was only a small part of the Aurora line. I might sit on the MBT-70 for a few more years, but if Atlantis doesn’t reissue it, I may well just crack the box and build it.
I remember building the Stalin, mobile ammo tank thing, and a couple others, but the bestone was the M-4.
Don’t worry about not being able to tell the difference between a tank and a self propelled gun, the news media, for the most part can’t tell the difference between a hummer and a tank.
Ok, memory is a fickle & fuzzy thing, but weren’t those Revell kits reboxes of the Peerless/Lifelike kits? Which were in a range with a number of similar stuff, like the 120mm AA cannon, and some of the early missiles, like the Hawk, & the truck-mounted Honest John.
I have this memory of the kit figures not being quite to the level of the green vinyl “army men” too.
There were a few missile kits around when I was about 10. One I liked had the dart anti tank missile along with a couple others. They might have been put out by Hawk.
There was also the Nike series, Bomarc, a Sky Sweeper anti aircraft gun, and others. When I was stationed in Maine, sometimes I would drive by an old Bomarc battery and could stop and look around the site. The missiles were stored underground on their launch racks under shielded metal doors and wqhen erady, the doors opened and the launchers were brought up for firing. They had a couple bays opened and were flooded with crystal clear ice water. It must have been some experience because the site was mostly underground, very close to the missiles. The guards were only about 50 feet or so from the launchers.
Revell did most of its own work on the 1/40 kits. Armor modelers had it pretty rough out there until the 1970s, with the mishmash of scales and generally poor kits that were available prior to then.
How about these two dusty old suvivours of the Great BB Gun War of 1971?
How no clue how they made it but they were found in my parents attic several years ago along with about 75% of a second issue Aurora Focke Wulf. They are currently on a shelf in the basement awaiting clean up and return to service in their original configuration. I did have the Tiger, Patton and Stalin as well but they all persihed in a hail of low velosity lead and cherry bomb.
Nice that you still have the kits. I don’t have anything left from my childhood. The Centurion was rather dodgy, but the S-Tank was a decent kit, and one of the few modern releases in the Aurora armor lineup. Although, it was a prototype modeled by Aurora, not the production vehicle. The kit lacks some significant things from the production S-Tank, like the flotation system. I’d like to see Atlantis reissue it, though, along with some of the other kits like the Churchill.
