Hooben T-55A Build

[Pavel]

You are always welcome!
If you want to add fine details and give explanations to colleagues, then mark the bolts on the wheels with red paint.
These are screws that can be unscrewed - oil nipples. Oil is poured into the bearings through them...

[Martin2556]

You are always welcome!
If you want to add fine details and give explanations to colleagues, then mark the bolts on the wheels with red paint.
These are screws that can be unscrewed - oil nipples. Oil is poured into the bearings through them...

Thanks again Pavel for your valuable input, interesting details.

[Pavel]

I will express one thought (maybe it is stupid).
On my friend's website (aviation) there is a section "Materials and photos"
Colleagues collect information on different aircraft and the admin systematizes them and publishes them in open access for registered users.
And makes life easier for those who are going to build this or that aircraft, there he chooses the information that he considers useful for himself.
The library is constantly being replenished with new finds, scans from books and rare photos from the Internet...

[Pavel]

And one more smaaaall.
Side lights and formation lights are bulbs with a white, or rather milky cap, if they are not turned on, red at the back, green at the front, yellow at the side.
When turned off, they are white...

[Martin2556]

Thanks again Pavel for posting some more useful detailing information.

[Abe Froman]

I thought i was looking at a real weather beaten T-55A. What a build. The quality of builds on this site is REDICULOUS! Fantastic build sir.

[Martin2556]

I thought i was looking at a real weather beaten T-55A. What a build. The quality of builds on this site is REDICULOUS! Fantastic build sir.

Many thanks Abe Froman

[Marc780]

Great work. I hope mine turns out that good.

Me too, I also attempted not one but TWO of these...by attempted I mean, I was not completely happy with tank #1, just went ahead and bought another one, which unfortunately ended up to be worse than the first one.
My excuse is something caused by old age, that is maddening, mainly because I can barely even start a model anymore from it, I have severe back pain from a slipped disk (and one of the very WORST side-effects of that, is how it is close to impossible now for me to build a scale model!)

Anyway I found the Hooben T-55 to be the most half-baked, second rate scale model kit I've ever seen in my life. But the Hooben folks DID at least get most of the fundamentals correct. The hull, turret and deck are pretty good and can be made serviceable at least...the problem is, just to make a working tank from the kit, requires at least ten times the effort it should. The instructions are dodgy as hell, pretty much just one rung above "better than nothing". The tank is an odd mix of first-class parts (hull, turret,tracks, road wheels, and a few other bits) in the same box with complete junk (the so-called suspension parts, for one, that are made from the world's most brittle castings, that will break at the first opportunity).

I really feel this tank could be at least Heng Long quality, but not without a lot of work by the Hooben designers - if they even exist - and which is never going to happen. I can imagine designing some kind of third-party kit (yes, a kit for this tank kit), that will fix most or all of the problems it has. At a minimum, it would need totally different castings for the suspension arms (i.e. metal that doesn't crack when you screw into them).
Also it needs a lot better designed mechanism, for the main gun elevation and recoil function. The parts that come with it, are complete rubbish and impossible to make function as intended without hours of re-working!