Essentially a conversion of a regular Sherman equipped with the 17-pound British gun, the Firefly was the first Allied tank able to successfully engage Panthers and Tigers at long range!
Introduction
This is an old kit. You can feel it in the way that the pieces are cast, in the quality of the plastic and on the old paper instruction booklet that you can find inside.
Assembly Process
The lower hull is assembled from 4 pieces that fit together ok. I say ok and not good or very good because you have to be careful to align them or they will stay at a very low angle that will create a 1-2mm gap.
The wheels are few and they glue together nicely, however you have to be extra careful when cutting them. I was extra careful but i didn’t manage to cut them without losing any “teeth”.
It was really easy getting them on the lower hull.
Next was the turret which is mostly molded and has 2-3 pieces that you actually glue on it.
The upper hull has most of the stuff molded on it and again only 3-4 pieces that you can actually glue. One particular painful step was the headlight which is so small i actually gave up after 5 minutes of trying to pin it into place.
The turret has a nice catching mechanism which allows it to rotate 360 degrees quite easily.
Once all this was done I simply glued the lower hull and the upper hull together. Warning: the tracks are awful with a capital A. They are fiddly and hard to catch into place and once you have to glue the model together they actually force themselves between the 2 pieces and add to the difficulty of getting a clean crisp no gap junction.
Evaluation
| Plastic Quality | 2 (Bad) | Bad towards very bad. The plastic is soft and it bends easily. A bit of flash is also present. |
| Number of Details | 2 (Bad) | Not that many details. Only 48 pieces make up this vehicle. |
| Instructions | 3 (Mediocre) | Not really good but not really bad also. Lack of colored paint schemes is a minus. |
| Building Time | 5 (Perfect) | A very fast kit to build, as it has so few details. It only took 35 minutes. |
| Enjoyment | 3 (Mediocre) | It’s easy to make but you’re not going to feel like you worked on it at all. |
The number of pieces did not bother me at all compared to the quality of the plastic this kit is made of. Although easy to bend or twist or scratch it proved to be quite unwieldy in the small pieces, causing the thing to actually crack while i was cutting a good few millimeters away from the actual place where it cracked. Maybe it’s just me!
I got a chuckle out of the fact that the sprues had a “Made in …” mark and the name of the country was completely erased. Seems someone didn’t want me to find out where they are producing these.
As a closing note i have to say that the bridge is quite nice in my opinion and to be completely honest it is a piece of terrain that you can use on your wargames table, so that’s a plus right there!
Final consideration: easy kit to assemble with few pieces made of crappy plastic and awful tracks. If you are not bothered by the quality of the model and just want something on the table fast, i could still find better alternatives but of course a bit more expensive ones (hint: Dragon).
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