German sFH 18 Howitzer w/Limber

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German sFH 18 Howitzer w/Limber
Ref. # 6392
Scale: 1/35
Manufacturer: Dragon
Price: Unknown
Material: Styrene. PE. DS100 Vinyl, Aluminium, Brass

For larger resolution photographs, please see the gallery album.

Introduction

The 15 cm sFH 18 gun, was the basic German heavy howitzer during the WWII. It was based on the WWI 15 cm sFH 13. "sFH" meant schwere Feld Haubitze (Heavy Field Howitzer).

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The Kit

The kit consists of seven large sprues of grey styrene, one sort of sprue with the trail 'legs', two small sprues of DS100 tan coloured vinyl, a transparent sprue, aluminium barrel, two brass cylinders, and two tiny photo-etched frets, one in brass and one in nickel. Oh...and a decal sheet!

Not much I can say about the quality....as usual, the moulding is near perfect, i.e. no flash and no ejector pin marks to speak of. Dragon have made much use of slide moulding technology with this kit, for example the wheels of both the gun and the limber are produced using slide moulds, and as such all the characteristic grooves are already in place.

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The two trails are joined together on a sort of sprue, and again, slide moulding technology has been used to it's best effect, as you can see from the photographs, with all those lovely rivets on three sides and hollow to boot! I have to wonder why Dragon hasn't managed to mould a gun slide in one piece yet, looking at these! Although it has to be said that the slide is 'slide' moulded and has much better detail on it's inside than I've seen on any other kit of a field gun.

The kit is all new, although parts of it were included in Dragon's recent release of the 'Grasshopper'. Even the gun itself is all new, although the Hummel used the same gun of course. In this kit the barrel is supplied as a turned aluminium one, superbly drilled out to a good depth too, instead of previous efforts we've seen which were just hollowed out to a centimetre or so. I can't imagine why, but there just might be somebody out there who doesn't like metal barrels...in which case you have a problem, since there actually isn't a plastic one supplied with this kit! You can also recoil the barrel for those of you who would want to depict the gun in a diorama setting during firing.

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The gun itself can be built in either 'firing mode' or on the limber, and the main gun can be elevated to depict various angles. There are brass cylinders included in the kit to represent the elevation cylinders, along with photo-etched parts for part of the elevation mechanism and photo-etched nickel parts to represent the elevation-firing table and data plate on the gun.

All the sights on the gun are supplied as transparent plastic, so with a careful paint job should look really good. What I really like are the parts in Dragons DS100 vinyl. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it's a light tan-coloured vinyl styrene developed by Dragon, which is supposed to be fully 'cement-able' with normal styrene cement. It's advantages are, obviously that it's more flexible, but is also supposed to hold 'sharper' detail when moulding. In this kit, the wickerwork cases for the shells are supplied in this plastic, along with two wicker ground mats. Take a look at the photographs and you'll see what I mean when I say these are really going to look good when painted appropriately.

Included in the kit are 5 GR.19 and 5 GR.19 Schwere Betongranate rounds, which are (apparently) concrete-piercing, as well as a number of propellant charges.

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Markings

Markings-wise I don't suppose Dragon could do a lot in this area! What we do get is a generic sort of artillery decals including 'kill' rings, along with markings for the rounds and their packing.

Conclusion

Although not a huge kit, this will build up into a superb model of the howitzer, and of course would look even better being towed behind it's prime mover, the Sd.Kfz.7....if we had a modern one that is! Come on Dragon! Recommended!

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My Thanks to Dragon for the review sample

For full information on all Dragon products, please see their website, Dragon Models Ltd.