I always wondered if these old Tamiya motorized kit work very well? Where would you get the motors at? Anyone ever try this?
Yes…and no…
The electric motor came with the kit. It was a “Mabuchi” brand motor. I just tossed the motor and built the kit. One I had was a Soviet T-61 with a horrible rubber band track. This was about 1970 and there were no after-market detailed tracks.
…those were the days…
More often than not, they would go a couple of feet and throw a track. [proplr] [:(DD]
I’ve got a Tamiya 1/35 M113 motored up. I haven’t tried it in several years, but could it run! It traveled about 80-100 mph in scale speed. It usually hit a wall before it threw a tread, but I don’t think it ever broke. I’ll probably have to drag it out of the attic stash now. Rick
Heck yeah. I had the M10 motorized. I used to play with that for hours, driving over stuff. It was so cool.
Most of them work pretty well. I made a couple as a kid in the 70’s, a panther and tiger, played with them for hours. In my mid 40’s I seen the kits for sale on ebay and now that I have the money I’ve got nearly every 1/35 motorized kit available on ebay. I have about 70 tanks built now, all motorized. Most are tamiya, some nichimo, some academy and some trumpeter, trumpeter are a bit sketchy but they work ok, the tracks suck for sure.
I’ve motorized all the panzer 4 variants, a strumtiger, a merkiva, a challenger, all the leopard varients, a m3 lee a churchill, a pershing, a marder II, a sgt york, all the T 34 varients, a ferdinand, etc… I plan to have them all, though some are quite expensive, might take a while.
HI , You bet !
I had two of the motorized ships .all I can say is BLAH ! The old LINDBERG motorized kits (even the ones you had to assemble the motor as well ) ran good and I have at least three I converted to R.C. because they just worked so darned well .I always changed out the motors with the " MABUCHI " cans you could get for slot car models . This is one reason I still play with motorized kits .I convert them to R.C. and have running models (granted smaller ) That are not generally available in the larger (read 1/96 here ) unless you pay a lot or scratchbuld . I just like to play with them once in a while as a break from building a show stopper for a client ! If TAMIYA had gotten it even close to right I would have more. As to tanks and ARMOR . I have one of their large scale tanks .Cant keep the tracks on it !
VERY fond memories of those.
My brother had an M60 and I had a Swedish Strv 103 (both 1/48, I think). We had many hard-fought campaigns in the back yard and driveway, before both eventually died in a hail of .22 cal. pellet gun fire. (I can still see the S-Tank’s lower hull spinning in slow, defiant circles on the one remaining track, before it finally succumbed to one last, well-placed shot…)
I had the Saladin armored car in the early '70s. I guess since it had the advantage of being wheeled it worked pretty well. IIRC it wouldn’t follow turns too well on tile floor but on the driveway it did will. With good batteries ISTR it did will in dirt and on carpet.
Rule of thumb on the motorized Tamiya kits is that if the tank had side skirts, they kept the tracks on and the tank worked very well. I still have a number of motorized Tamiya armor kits; my favorites were the M1 Abrams (with wired remote that turned the turret) and the M113. I added the upper hull and turret from the M113A1 FSV to that kit.
The Matilda was also a great motorized tank that never threw a track.
You da man, Tankman. I also caught the Tamiya motorized bug, in 1980. Most of the motorized stuff was still on the market. I created a wargame using these kits. I played the German side, with Grossdeutchland stuff, and my opponent played the American side.
There were fireworks and pellet guns involved, but a tank had to be moving to be considered a legit target. We attached fish line to a customized switch, and the other end to a stake in the ground. The line was 15’ long, so when the tank had gone 15’, the line grew taught and turned off the motor. It was really hard to find terrain suitable for such vehicles. Our final battle was fought in a dried up prehistoric lake bed near Barstow CA. We spent a lot of money getting there, shipping the models, etc.
Ultimately, my GD kampfgruppe had some 50 motorized models, including about 8 Pz IV, 6 Stug III, 5 Tigers and 10 Panthers. I even had some Pz II in the armored recon unit. I had 2 Prime movers to tow the 88s, but these never made it into a game. Later, I converted the Stugs into Pz III from DAK, along with 3 Pz II.
The most difficult was the Pz IV, because Tamiya mounted the drive nuts, which fit into the drive sprockets on the model, about one or two mm too far outboard. This is what made this particular model throw its tracks. Once I figured out the problem, performance improved greatly. Pz IV, Pz III and Pz II all suffered from narrow tracks. The wide tracked Panthers and Tigers were no sweat. All the American stuff, also with wide tracks, ran great. It’s a good thing, too, because my American counterpart had no patience for fiddly stuff in the field.
Eventually, we got two more friends into it, one went British and the other Russian. The Russians needed no more than the fantastic T-34, tho the KV also came in a motorized version. The Brit had bigger problems. Only the Matilda came motorized, but this resourceful player did take a motorized system off a Sherman and fitted it into a crockodile. Very innovative, and it ran great.
Ultimately, since I didn’t have any place to display the models, I gave them to a guy who was wargaming in Oregon. Not using the motorized systems, but at least there was somebody getting some use out of the tanks, instead of them rotting in boxes.
I do miss those days.
Depends on the gearbox. Some kits had thin metal gears and others had broad plastic gears.
The ones with the thin gears would run, but because all of the tank’s power is being pushed on small thin surface areas on the gears the steel gear would cut into the brass connecting gear effectivly wearing out in not much time.
The plastic gears are more durable as the suface areas where the gears meet are wider and the load is distributed evenly.
Some kits had a single motor, others had dual motor drive for use with a wire connected controller. These dual motors have more power and can actually be converted to RC if the builder is savy
Tamiya also sells a modern dual motor gearbox that many poeple use for 1/35th scale RC conversions, and I myself have performed many static to motorized conversions of tamiya kits, and the ones that work the best are the older kits which were once deisgned to be motorized (M60, M48A3, Type 74…etc) as the hulls can come apart mostly seamlessly to access the gearbox and change the battery. and the conversion is actually very easy to perform to one of these kits and running is also pretty good for the small scale size and indoor use
Me and my friends regularly turned our backyards into “Tamiya tank torture testing grounds” by making dirt obstacles and water crossings. My friend’s M41 Walker Bulldog was the top champion, as it never threw a track and even ran underwater! Of course it had to be retired after that amphibious maneuver because the motor rusted - but it didn’t short out which was amazing.
My personal fav was the M60A1, but the tracks came off at the slightest provocation. I should have kept the gearboxes to hawk on fleabay! They seemed to hold up well, and I never had one break. Of course they were stuffed up with axle grease, which eventually got everywhere.
The kits with two motors and steering control box never seemed to work reliably, plus at around $14 to $18, were too rich for us poor kids!
Ah the 1970s an innocent time when models were FUN! Great thread subject!
The Sdkfz 7 half track ran well.
So did the panther.
The 1/25 one.
Had a couple of T34 76s that ran ok.
Different topic but the new motorized Tamiya Mark IV Male moves very nicely to scale,slow and ponderous.I only ran it in the beginning to check it out,now it’s just display.
Wow, I had the old Abrams with the three motors, one for the turret and one for each tread and a wired control as a teen. Pretty neat model actually. It’s still around somewhere, no idea if she’d still work or not.
When I was a kid in the early 80’s I saved up a few weeks allowance and bought a 1/25 scale Academy Panther that came with a remote control. It had a movable suspension, individual plastic track links, and a controller. Like all toys, I eventually got bored with it and tried to see if I could create a submersible tank by filling gaps with putty and sealing open areas with tape. I ruined it the first time I drove it into the pool!
That kit was/ is a reissued Tamiya model.