Hat began releasing some WWII 1/72nd scale armor recently under the brand name Armourfast (tm). Their first release was an M4 Sherman. The box contains two very simple to assemble Shermans. This is a no frills model with clean mold lines and only eight pieces to assemble. The turret sub-assembly is four pieces. There is a turret shell, 75mm gun, gun mantle (type M34) and the stick that centers the turret into the hull. The hull sub-assembly is also four pieces and includes the two tracks, the hull underbody and the hull top. There is only minor mold flash, which I easily removed with adsizing (sliding the edge of the Xacto knife along the mold line). The total assembly time from cutting from the sprue to completed model, using super glue, was about 10 minutes. The model is made up of a medium hardness plastic. I really liked this model. This is a war gaming model. It has very little special details and none of the small parts that usually are attached by the modeler, like headlights, bow machine gun, periscopes, etc. There are no shovels, pick axes or towing cables molded into the hull plastic. No machine guns are provided with the model. The M4 is the welded hull version and looks to have the longer track base. I assume Hat is modeling the 75mm version of the mid or late war Sherman, although I couldn't actually determine if it was supposed to be an M4A3 with side skirts (sand skirts?) or if it's an M4A2. The arced hull back ove the rear engine access doors kind of threw me. I couldn't find an exact match in any of my references. Their next model due out is the German JagdPanther. They have a German Pzkw III coming out and the American M-10 Tank Destroyer. From the pictures, it looks like the M-10 is the late war version. They also list a Russian T-34 and the early pictures look like a T-34/76 model. Hat doesn't give firm production dates until late in the production cycle. Also, the Sherman was in production and available in Europe months before any of the distributors had them. This has also been the pattern with Hat's figures. Back to MWAN # 122 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com