Converting the 1/35 Tamiya SdKfz 250/9 into the SdKfz 252, 1/35 scale

Armor

Esta edición especial está sólo disponible en formato pdf (Español e Ingles) . Esta es una nota técnica de 11 páginas. Incluye más de 34 imágenes de alta resolución. > Aquí

This special issue is only available in pdf format. This is a technical article of 11 pages. Includes more than 34 high res pictures. > Here

In 2000, Dragon announced new references among their variety of vehicles mounted on the SdKfz chassis: this time was turn for the closed roof variants, the SdKfz 252 and SdKfz 253. A year later, this last one was released as a kit, but nothing was ever heard about the 252. Today, we’re waiting for it to be released as it’s still being announced but….there’s no news to this respect. Tired of waiting, I decided make this conversion from scratch since in point of fact, it would not mean a lot of trouble. I took as base this old kit from Tamiya, the SdKfz 250/9, simply because I had it handy. I could have chosen any Dragon kit that are comparatively better in quality than the Tamiya’s and would have been a good option.

The kit

The SdKfz 252 were manufactured over “Alte” (old) chassis, the early model of chassis Anyway as the Alte chassis had small differences between each other, I had to modify the Tamiya’s kit to correct those details, apart from cutting the rear part to replicate the typical shape of the vehicle.

Building

I started to assemble the running gear and hull according to instructions. I used a set of tracks from a Dragon SdKfz 250 better than the Tamiya ones.

They are narrower, this is why the external wheels don’t lean on correctly, but in spite of this problem, the Dragon tracks looked nice!!