PST 1/72nd ZiS-42 By James D. Gray

Background

3HC-42 are (close enough) the Cyrillic letters for ZiS-42, the model I've built here. I'd intended to build another GAZ truck, but the ZiS came on-line as sort of a backup, and as Robert Benchley said, "a man can do any amount of work, so long as it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing." So the ZiS took over while the GAZ languished.

Since Soviet transport is a somewhat obscure subject, let me inflict a little history on you. Pre-revolutionary Russia was largely agricultural, with little heavy industry, and what industry there was, was heavily damaged in the First World War and the ensuing Russian Civil War. Forced to build an industrialized society out of virtually nothing, the Soviet Union freely sought technical assistance abroad. One aspect of this was their automotive industry: rather than attempt to start from the very bottom, they decided to get a "jump start" by building tried vehicles under license. The ZiS medium truck was a slight adaptation of an American Autocar company design.

Instead of continuing to purchase new and improved designs abroad (an expensive business) the Soviets preferred to develop and improve the basic designs they had purchased already. The ZiS-5 truck thus begat the ZiS-6 truck with dual rear axles, the ZiS-5V wartime version (designed to be produced more cheaply and using fewer precious resources), and at least three different sorts of halftracks, the last and most common of which is the ZiS-42.

ZiS stands for "Factory named after Stalin." After deStalinization, they changed the name to "Factory named after Lenin," which some might recognize as the ZiL factory.

The Kit

This kit has been around a while, and like a lot of kits from former Soviet countries, the manufacturers try to get as much milage out of the molds as possible. PST, who currently has them, produce over a dozen different versions of this kit, including a self-propelled 37mm gun, workshop vehicles, and even fire trucks. The kit has its good points and its bad points. The basic parts look good, and fit properly. The detail, on the other hand, is often missing and where present usually crude - sometimes inaccurate as well. It is advertised as 1/72nd scale, but when compared with Nikolai Polikarpov's drawings it scales out pretty close to 1/76th.

Construction

I started with the cab and chassis. These go together pretty well, with a bit of care, and the final result does indeed look ZiS. I wanted to have a crewman with his arm on the windowsill, so I left the roof open to give me access inside the cab. The fenders look pretty good but are too thick, of course, and benefit a lot from some careful thinning. I spent a lot of time scraping these and other details down with a sharp blade. The front leaf springs are molded solid onto the frame, its worst feature. This shows quite plainly forward of the front wheels. Probably the best thing to have done would have been to cut the springs off and replace them with scratchbuilt springs, but I always try to use the kit parts if I can. I drilled and cut out the gap between spring and frame, and eventually got a fairly good looking result; it would still have been better to replace it, though. The upper front corners of the frame need to be rounded off. I found that the front of the frame needs to be 2-3mm shorter too, but that came later. The front of the frame is held together by a rod between the two "horns", which isn't present in the kit. I included it, but in the halftrack variant it's a waste of time; it is virtually invisible.

I moved onto the rear halftrack units and the driver. The driver is a whitemetal casting from AB figures, who mostly do very good wargame figures in 15mm. Their 1/76th scale model figures are good but have a tendency to wargamish "big heads", as does this little guy. While somehow it's not so obvious in person, in photographs this big-headedness is quite apparent. Otherwise it's a good figure; I think next time I'll try a Frankensteinian head-swap with one of the excellent heads out of Preiser's Luftwaffe set. But anyway, I wanted a figure with some life to liven up the vehicle, and he looked pretty stiff sitting there, head to the front, arms rigidly fixed to his sides. I cured this paralysis by cutting his head off (a radical cure, to be sure) and turned it a bit to the left. I also cut off his left arm and replacing it with a Preiser arm, sticking its elbow out the window. The left hand was cut off as well to fit it carefully to the steering wheel. I had to test-fit him into the cab several times to get everything lined up correctly, but the result was most pleasing when complete.

After doing several 1/72nd scale figures - not as accessories to models, but as figures in their own right - I've abandoned the subtle approach to painting them. The delicacies of painting 54mm figures are wasted in this scale. The detail and personality of the figure disappears at normal viewing distances. I shade and highlight my figures boldly, otherwise no one will be able to see what I've done. As a finishing touch, I put a cigarette in his right hand. Very politically incorrect these days, but back in the 'forties everyone smoked like chimneys.

The rear halftrack units were the most onerous parts of the model. The kit doesn't even come with all the parts you need to build them up! Each of the four big wheels is made up of three parts, only two of which are in the kit. I cut the extra disks needed out of sheet plastic using a pair of sharpened dividers; an old technique and a good one, but tedious on plastic this thick. The rear wheels are spoked (perhaps the front ones as well, but I can't see them clearly in any of my sources) and there is no representation of this anywhere in the kit. I drilled them out and then cut the remaining plastic between the holes into spokes with a sharp X-Acto knife. Then came the really tedious bit; the link-and-length tracks have no detail on their faces at all. I had to cut a lengthwise groove in each one, and then make a tread out of two bits of lead wire, cut into elongated U shapes. It doesn't help that the individual links (not really links; it's a continuous rubber track like US halftrack tracks) in the track are differing sizes. But, in the end the result looks good, and the plastic is just right for bending into a good sag.

Oh, and I left the treads off the bottom run of track since these would be buried in any surface but concrete or asphalt, and these were in short supply in the Soviet Union. I hate seeing tracked vehicles standing on their tippy-toes like they don't weigh anything!

Additional work involved was filling and re-drilling the holes for the rear axles in the track units; these are way too low and too far back. I added some reinforcing plates in the upper side of the halftrack frames. There just wasn't room to make these the correct shape but I did the best I could. The return wheels don't have anything to attach to so I glued them onto the bottom of the upper track run; instead of holding up the track they are suspended from it!

The rear suspension was another problem. The kit has some featureless blocks with holes in them, ugh. The real thing is a complex setup with inner and outer leaf springs. I replaced the kit blocks with longer blocks (the rear end of all these old trucks sits high, and comes down level only if the bed is fully loaded) but I couldn't stand that for long. It's not hard to see those blocks from the outside. So I cut them off and replaced them with a very simplified representation of the springs. Then after a modelling session or two I couldn't stand those either and redid them with as much detail as I could manage. They are still too tall but otherwise look good.

A word to other modellers trying to put this kit together; when it was almost done I found the kit tracks sat much too far to the rear, a fact not apparent until I tried to install the rear fenders and they bumped the tracks, while loads of room was still present behind the front fenders. I "fudged" the tracks by moving the axle-hole yet again, but a better solution would be to assemble the track units first, get a good idea where your fenders are going to be, and then put your rear springs and differential in the right place between them.

The towing pintle is a toy, not a model part. It's a simple vertical spike, most unsatisfactory. I cut it off and replaced it. The real thing has two triangular plates above and below the drawbar, with a vertical hole through them for a pin. I left this pin loose so I can someday tow a load behind.

The bed is fair, the fit of the parts is good, but the details are again lacking. There is nothing to hold the tailgate up! I went back to the photographs and drawings and made my own latches out of truly tiny bits of wire, plastic, and sheet aluminum. I added hooks on the sides of the bed for tying down tarps or loads, and mounted two big boards to the outsides as well; these are not on all these vehicles but the photos show them on many. I wish I knew what they were for...

This vehicle must have had bad gas mileage; the original truck has a gas tank under the driver's seat, while the halftrack version adds not one, not two, but three more tanks in the spaces of the frame, under the bed. Two are difficult to see and I whittled them out of a bamboo chopstick, but the third one is larger and a part of the bed's foundation is actually cut away to make room for it! The X-shaped stamped ribs on the tank's end I made out of thin plastic rod, scraped down one side to make it half-round. I didn't add the fill pipe until later since it has to co-ordinate itself with the front halftrack fender.

There is a "pan" or perhaps you'd call it a "sled" under the bottom of the front suspension, and over the top of the front of the frame. This protects the engine and front suspension and steering gear from getting ripped out on big rocks, and helps the vehicle make it over rocks and mud even without a powered front axle. There is a kit part, which isn't worth anything. Throw it away. The top is sheet copper, bent to shape and with two louvers cut out of it. I formed the louvers by hand; I cut a slit in the metal and bend the metal above the slit out with a burnisher. They never did get completely satisfactory, remaining obstinately uneven and unequal in size. Eventually frustration made them "good enough". The bottom of the pan is also sheet copper, with bent brass "legs" and copper wire ribs on either side. Unfortunately, when all assembled and glued to the frame, it just didn't look right. The whole thing stuck out way too far in front of the front wheels. I tried to convince myself to live with it, but it didn't work and I pried it off (thank goodness for the low strength of metal joints held together with superglue!) and cut several millimeters more off the front of the frame. You'll remember my mentioning that earlier. Happily the pan was little damaged by its adventure and, with some trimming, I refit it easily back into place.

Once the bed is glued in place I made and installed the fenders for the rear halftrack units. The kit comes with fenders, and perhaps the rear ones might be used. The front ones were useless. The correct shape is complex, curved in one dimension and in the other it has to fit over the complicated shape of the side of the cab. I fashioned these fenders out of sheet copper. Nothing is better for work of this sort; the copper is far more co-operative than plastic would be, sands well, bends well, and keeps its shape after bending. The rear fenders are just sheet styrene with copper wire for the vertical strengthening ribs. There were mudflaps in addition, but many photographs showed these missing and I'd had just about enough so mine went missing as well.

The headlights are much too big, and I couldn't think how I was going to replace them. In the end, I made the kit parts work by scraping and sanding them down to a more reasonable diameter. This wasn't made any easier by the bar that is molded on them, to hold them up between the front fenders. I managed to do what I wanted to do without breaking this bar off, thank goodness. I drilled out the front faces with a large drillbit, glued in a disk of shiny aluminum foil, and then made lenses out of epoxy glue.

Another very frustrating (but in the end satisfying) struggle took place with the brushguard. This item is a vertical set of bars which protects the radiator and headlights. The kit item is very coarse, with enormously thick bars of triangular cross-section. I sure didn't want to have to produce this item from scratch, though, so I very carefully thinned and flattened the plastic bars with a very sharp X-Acto blade, file, and sandpaper. When this was done, without even breaking it, I inserted another vertical bar of strip polystyrene between each kit bar. With care lining them up, this made a much more convincing representation of the brushguard than what came out of the box.

I do my painting as-you-go, to keep from dying of frustration trying to paint inaccessable areas. My system is simple, and generally effective. The base is a dark green (my favorite, Humbrol Deep Bronze Green) heavily drybrushed with a lighter green (another favorite, Pactra Light Olive). This gives the effect of darker colors in the inner corners, grooves and holes that you would get with a wash, but I prefer this since it gives me more control. After the model is about finished, I dirty things up with a drybrush of Humbrol German Armor Yellow, and then I go back over it with that Light Olive to tone the dirt effect down, and eliminate the overemphasis on corners and edges that drybrushing tends to produce. Black areas (the chassis and tires) get the same treatment, only with black and a very dark gray instead of the greens.

The last item to be added is the glass. I cut this from the sort of thin clear flexible plastic you find stiffening a shirt collar when you buy a new shirt. Maybe there is an easy way to do this, but I don't know what it is. I cut-fit-cut-fit-cut-fit until it fits or I cut it too small and I have to throw it away and start over. I didn't have to throw any of these bits away and start over! Maybe I am learning patience. They are held in place with white glue. One tip; way back at the beginning, when I was building the cab, I installed some very thin strips of styrene edging the inside edge of the windows. This made it a lot easier to secure the glazing in place. Another tip; if you blacken the edge of your glass before installing it, it makes the edges of the glass much harder to see, and gives a more realistic effect.

Conclusion

Finally, I would like to suggest that if you want to do really good work, photograph your model at frequent intervals during construction. Flaws that your eye just skips over, or that your mind is trying to ignore, just pop out at you when you look at the pictures. After the pictures I took for this article, I had to go back and take the roof off the cab and sand it flat, and re-attach the roof. In person it looked just fine, but in the pictures it wouldn't do at all.

Now it's back to that GAZ truck...