F
Fenlander
Guest
The BT-7 was a decent tank in its day. It was fast, reasonably armoured and had a respectable gun, all good enough at the outbreak of war. It was a bit odd in that it adopted the Christie suspension of the early Vickers tanks that were sold to the Soviets, including the ability to drive on roads without tracks. This was one of Christie's ideas to make tanks faster. It took about 30 minutes to remove the tracks then lock the first road wheel at the rear to the drive system, release the lock to allow the front road wheel behind the return roller to steer and for the driver to attach a steering column to steer it with. The long travel verticle coil Spring suspension gave a decent ride and was kept and modified through many Soviet tanks through the War and beyond including the ubiquitous T34. The ability to run without tracks though soon disappeared.
The kit is OK. It isn't a Tamiya or Dragon but it has a fairly low part count and appears accurate enough to look like a BT-7. Good enough for me. The detail, such as there is, is well moulded and the box art depicts a command vehicle easily identified by the horizontal antennae around the turret and the red band, sometimes white and possibly other colours, to identify it. In fact it might as well have carried a big placard with "Shoot me first" written on it. Early in the war, and even surprisingly late on, most Soviet tanks did not carry wireless sets. The Command tank had the radio and communicated with other tanks in the troop by sticking signal flags up through a small hatch on the turret top. So, lose this tank and the others were blind and deaf to what was going on.
There are some issues with the kit and, being suitably forewarned by that cheery chapie Harry Houdini from Australia who has a superb and entertaining YouTube channel, I was aware of the short falls. For extras, well, I have followed Harries lead and got the Eduard photo etch set, an aluminium barrel for the main gun and the Bronco track set.
The track set is a must. The supplied tracks are just wrong. I don't mean this in a rivet counting way, they are the wrong tracks and do not fit. Zvezda appear to have included tracks for a later type and the links are too long. As the tracks have a guide pin every other track, it means that you cannot take out a single link to correct this. Weird I know, but there you are.
So, I have bored you enough, on with the pre build pictures.
All the bits
Photo etch
Barrel (cost me £1)
Bronco Tracks, says workable but we shall see
And the kit itself
Pretty standard instructions
And those track links
Hopefully you can see the difference compared to the correct brown Bronco links
So that's the plan. The photo etch replaces quite a bit of plastic and just about doubles the part count but it will be an interesting exercise to get me back into some serious photo etch. In fact planning the PE will be the first stage
First update will be soon, hope you enjoy
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so from now on, I hope it does indeed go together a treat 
. Some of the etch is superfluous such as this drivers control panel which I put in for a laugh as there is no other inside detail for the drivers position other than a dubious looking 'armchair' and a steering wheel which would only be used if building it trackless :rolleyes:
