Scale Plastic & Rail

Wonderland Models - Budapest 1945

 

Wonderland Models

MiniArt 36007

"Budapest 1945"

Diorama

 

Kit no: 36007

Scale: 1/35

Pieces: 816!!!

607 in styrene  for the S.P.G + 190 styrene for street accessories and crew +25 in vacform  + paper street and building signs

Ages: 10 and over

Price: GBP £37.99/ Euro 47.01 / US $57.19 – From Wonderland Models

Wonderland models from the UK has send us a kit of the new diorama from MiniArt – "Budapest 1945" this is a great big box full of vacform and plastic parts which recreates a diorama from Hungary's capitol city during the battle of Budapest in 1945. In this scene is a European style building with a base which is 30cm x 22cm. On which sit a Soviet Su-76 self propelled gun and its crew. They are depicted in a defensive position with the gun pointing menacingly out of a hole in the bottom of the building.

Now right from the start you are getting your money's worth here .Twenty-five massive slabs of Vac-form for the building, nine sprues for the tank , two for the building and street accessories and five figures on one sprue for the crew of the Su-76M  self propelled gun along with the added decals I don’t know how it could be had for under £40 quid in the UK – well done Wonderland!

Let's start with the biggest part of the kit -  the building and scenery.

I haven’t since I was  a child put together any Vac-formed scenery, it seems however ( and me being not a child for many many years) that Vac-form has moved on – the old simple detailed structures of the old toy kits are a thing of the past. These large pieces of Vac have their own skill set to employ to make this mound of plastic into a kit. At first I thought this was going to be just a "front on perspective" kit, but I was wrong.

 

Through scoring and cutting the Vac-form in the right way they can be joined together and made into quite a convincing three dimensional scene. The trick is to score along the outline of the walls while giving a mm or so extra if possible , so when it is sanded down to fit together it fits perfectly. So at first a daunting process is made simple. MiniArt has a great "How –to" on their website that shows the right way to do it in their "assembly guide" part of their homepage here - http://miniart-models.com/

 

Reading this put my mind at ease about the vac-form construction. The great part of using Vac on a kit like this is the weight saving properties. Just the base alone would be very heavy if created from resin, plaster or even regular injected plastic. Your shelves no longer need to shudder at the approach of a diorama that is a foot wide and over a foot tall.

 

MiniArt have a whole series of these diorama kits, and they do recycle their sprues to their best advantage. Putting this part of a kit here - using details somewhere else - The good point being for us that they include a heap of extras in each kit, there are street lamps, rubble bits, door and window frames and shutters. They are not the cleanest of sprues - there is some clean up to do, but it would be the same or worse with resin aftermarket accessories anyway.

 

This building, although set in Budapest is common to most central European buildings of the period. The thing setting this apart is the building signs provided in the box for the front of the building in Hungarian  - Have a guess what "Rom" and "Likor" mean ? There are street signs and a propaganda flag as well as many other options. If you did want to change the building's location places like www.unicornmodels.be do many signs and posters from the period in all European theatres of battle.

 

The Tank and Crew -  well again MiniArt have done the smart thing here and gotten an existing Self propelled gun kit and Combo and just added it into the diorama. It gives life to the scene and is well chosen as its scale compared to the building is done just right. It never overwhelms the scene that it is portrayed in.

 

The Soviet SU-76M kit plus Crew  kit is in itself made up of six hundred and seven parts in medium grey styrene. It can be had at Wonderland for £24.99 itself -http://www.wonderlandmodels.com/products/miniart-135-soviet-su-76m-crew/ so it kind of makes this kit a no brainer even more, the price only another £12 for the entire she-bang. The street accessories kit which includes some pieces of the extra parts of the diorama is £7.99 as well, further sealing the deal. We all love a bargain and so this added value just makes the whole thing more of a good buy.

 

The SU-76m Self Propelled Gun was a later design favoured by its crews because of its large gun and small size, 76mm gun which could defeat most German tanks until the Tiger and Panthers became common in the later war stages. The SPG is here in nine sprues of which five are for the tracks. A lot of this kit was adapted from their previous offering of the T-70 kit, but like art imitating life the T-70 morphed into the SU-76 and so does this kit, several sprues being used here again in this newer design. 

 

Now if you are looking for something like a dragon smart kit quality here you will be disappointed, as the kit neither has the crispness or the detail to match this new high standard. But neither does it have the high price or the complexity. So you are in a compromise here of price and amount of plastic and I think MiniArt pretty much gets away with it. There IS a lot of flash on the kit to clean up and some of the pieces require some trimming before it all goes together. There are no part numbers on the sprues for the tank so close scrutiny of the instruction sheet is needed. The gun has some nasty sink marks in either side and again the pin marks and flash are not your friend. There is however a very well detailed firing compartment with many spare rounds of unused and spent ammo plus crew defence weapons (PPsH-41 SMGs ) to be displayed inside. Crew seats and radio equipment are included to make this a very busy place if displayed well.

 

The SU-76M comes complete with decal options for five different versions of Soviet Vehicles from Eastern Prussia, Poland and Vilnius. This doesn’t really fit in well with the whole "Budapest 1945" theme but some suspending of reality could be the key here. After all it IS a diorama and you are portraying reality not living it. These decal options are not explained in the instructions but I have done your homework for you and here below are the vehicle schemes. It's a bit of an oversight not including them.

 

1. SPG Artillery Division, 11th Guard Army, Eastern Prussia 1944

2. Unknown Self-Propelled Regiment, Eastern Prussia 1945

3. 1238th SPG Regiment, Poland, March 1945

4. 1448th SPG Artillery Regiment, 9th Krasnodar Kozak Division, Poland 1944

5. 1223rd SPG Artillery Regiment, 5th Guard Army, 3rd Belorussian Front, Vilnus, July 1944

 

 

 

The SU-76m was as I said well liked by its crews but not in so much in winter because of its open interior. Its crews then wore winter clothing nearly all year around, and the crew of this SPG all wear the padded traditional Soviet clothing. The Telegroika padded combat jacket and trousers with the padded tanker's helmet.  Two of the crew also have great coats with separately moulded flaps on the bottoms of them which give each coat a weighted three dimensional look. The crew are well moulded with some good detail but they have some flash cleaning-up to do on each.

The crew members though are mostly to be positioned outside of the vehicle which strikes me as a bit odd as the commander is portrayed scanning the horizon for targets. So I  guess I would like to see the gun crew at their  stations instead of loading shells. Another issue I have is that there is no interior driver's seat or engine, this makes fiscal sense but no practical sense. The Crew obviously weren’t created for this individual SPG kit but at least they don't have clown outfits on –  I joke -  they are a fine crew kit and up to the standard of many other makes, and they do enhance the diorama. Colour call outs  for this kit are in Vallejo, Testors, Tamiya, Humbrol ,Revell  and Mr Colour which is great. Nice to have the paint choice for a change if that makes any grammatical sense.

 

So what do we think?

 

If you look past the not space age detail in the SU-76M kit which comes with it, which needs some work as well as the crew who need some work to make perfect, (these need not be used in this diorama anyway.) These are the only Minus points of the kit.

After being inspired by MiniArt's "How to" section on their website http://miniart-models.com/ I am stoked and am going to attempt to make this kit over the next month (or two) I'll keep you posted!

Yes I would buy it with my own money and that’s the highest praise. A great diorama - well priced. Reccomended if you are skillfull at vacform or not - this kit is going to be very enjoyable!

This kit is a winner

 

Adam Norenberg

Many thanks to Wonderland Models for the review sample used here.