This is the Dragon Korean War series 35th scale Pershing. The kit depicts a vehical attached to the 1st Marine battalion, Company B in Hamhung around 1950. The Marines were involved in a lot of armor battles and used the old German Afrika Korps trick of sending light tanks to attack the North Korean T-34's and luring them into ambushes where the Pershings easily chewed them to pieces. The M-26A-1's have the newer muzzle brake/fume extractor and a few other little details.



This kit is soooooooooo freakin' over engineered it's not even funny. I have this kit and the older Tamiya Pershing (with long barrel/no fume extractor). The differences are like night and day. The older Tamiya b###h slaps this kit. This kit's touted link-by-link tracks will not stay together with any amount of super glue, welding, etc. The detail that the over engineering gives you (hatches consisting of six parts each!) is no better than the Tamiya stuff. The mantlet does not fit at all. What you're seeing here is the finished turret, but the mantlet is actually physically bolted to the plastic as it just would not go in. I thought maybe it was too wide so I sanded to the point where any further sanding would have removed too much of the mantlet's width. Okay...maybe it's the mounting pins/bracket? I chopped them off and just tried to glue the mantlet and gun to the turret, completely happy with losing the ability of the gun to elevate/depress. Nope. No joy. The fits problems just wouldn't go away. Thinking it was me, I took the kit to my local model club and let the armor illuminati look it over. "Goddamn...really? No shit...never seen that before..." Most of the Pershing lovers have built the later Dragon kit. Oh well... Had some bolts so I glued the gun end of the mantlet on to a bolt and then physically bolted the mantlet to the turret. There you bastard...take that.



Oh yeah...notice the scribing and welding detail on the turret. Pretty cool, but like I said...too much over engineering. Parts for the sake of parts. A ton of options for fuel filler caps but they don't tell you which ones to use or why. Most of my research shows Army tanks without the side guards, but the few Marine vehicles I saw, kept theirs on. The kit comes with just markings for this vehicle, no other Marine tanks. Pretty boring, but hey... The wheels do not move either. Anyway...to overcome the shitty tracks, I grabbed some plastic ones from my Tamiya kit. What an improvement.



The color for the Marines at this juncture is best approximated with Tamiya Dark Green (rattle can). I used a bit of rust and Polyscale Night Black for the machine gun. The kit's gun was crap so I threw it away and grabbed an aftermarket AFV Club machine gun. If you want to do the track links, get the AFV Club workable links for the M-26. That's what the worthier Tamiya got in exchange for it's plastic tracks.

Cheers,


Don