I once again come to the fountain of knowledge seeking answers. LOL
Here is the deal, I have been “hired” by the army to put together a diorama of one of our arab allies armor. A lot of their equipment is the French stuff. As a result, it seems as though Heller is the major supplier of 1/35 scale French equipment. To add to the equation, I only have about 3 weeks to do this in. How does the Heller stuff go together? Does it go together pretty easily or is this going to be a cat fight trying to get one together. Let me know so that I can advise the good general here if I can do this or not. I know I can count on you guys!
Thanks
Hello Army,
From what I remember in tackling these babies great care must be given as the plastic was thin and soft,a lot of parts broke on me! Course this was back in the 80s when they first came out,Im not doing a whole lot of modern armour these days but if they haven`t changed their practices,they were hell! Congrats on you commission though!
I built the Heller 1/35 S-35 and I learned some new words doing so… It wasn’t the best fit, but in general it wasn’t all that bad. I have not built the more modern stuff, but you should have enough time in 3 weeks.
I built the Heller R-35 Light Tank about 9 months ago. The kit was generally pretty simple…few parts and simple instructions. Molding was fair…soft details, quite a bit of flash, and a bunch of visible ejector pin marks. The parts fit together fairly well, but there were a couple of issues with over sized or undersized parts. The real bear was the vinyl track…stiff as a board and extremely hard to install once formed into a loop. I broke off two top guide wheels during installation that were a real pain to repair.
All that said, it built up into a pretty nice little tank, but I’d never build another one.
If given a choice, run, don’t walk away from Heller. Brittle plastic, poorly illustrated instructions, poor fit, pin marks. This is the insurgency of kits.
If you have no choice, I’d say work on based on content not ease of work. You have your work cut out for you and I think it may be a case of good pr over accuracy and detail of build. Buckle down, get your patience hat on, and go to work. I can pretty much guarantee that if you’ll come out the other side a better modeler.
I’m sure, in the spirit of detante it is a noble and worthwhile project and the gesture is more important than the outcome. Surely more important than the ease of assembly and kit accuracy of detail.
If you know the problems in store for you and that it will be a less than Tamiya or Dragon kit, your expectations won’t exceed your abilities and resources and you’ll be happy with the outcome. Being that you don’t have alot of time on your hands to do this build and not many can say they have to build while people are mortaring and shooting at them, I think it can be accepted that the results will be less than what you might expect otherwise.
Good luck. And give the dogs a pat for me. I include them in my list of heroes over there.
I’ve built a couple of the WWII kits, and they were okay. Not up to the standards of Dragon or Tamiya by any stretch. The most important thing with Heller IMO is to get the four or six piece hull together square, after that it’s gravy so to speak. The only “modern” kit of theirs I have is the AMX 13 which I haven’t built yet, but looks to be very nice in the box. Their vinyl tracks are pretty lame and they were all too long as I recall.
I agree with the above statements. While I tend to like their choice of subjects, they tend to over-engineer the model using multiple pieces to create working parts. Also since they are a French company that specializes in French armor, you’d think that they would have a handle on accuracy, but they don’t.
Thanks for the heads up guys! I will report what you have told me to the powers that be and see where we go from there. After looking at availiblity of heller kits from US supliers this may just be a pipe dream anyway. According to Great Models web site they dont have anything in stock. Maybe I can contact Heller direct and get them to overnight ship here. France is a lot closer than the US, and with Fed Ex opening up in Baghdad we might be in business.
Again, all of you guys have been just great! I always look foward to opening the forums page first thing in the morning cause I know that I can always count on the people in it for a helping hand. It’s now time to tighten up the belt, and put my nose to the grind stone.
I know many don’t think Heller is good. I modelled a 1/35 Heller Leclerc. I think it was fun and looks good. Just studied parts and then cut a lot until parts fits best and had to hold with my thumbs long time with patience after gluing. I wish I can show you pics of my Leclerc show, but don’t have a good camera. It isn’t as good as Tamiya, Academy and Skif, though that kit looks very good. Yeah, it’s much better than Trumpeter.