Having bought a few of your kits of subjects not available through any of the main manufacturers I thought I'd send you my thoughts. First the bouquets: Excellent choice of subjects in German artillery and tractors. Now the brickbats: Very poor instructions; the fixing of many parts is rather ambigious to say the least, as are the location points. The drive sprockets (front and rear) of the Raupenschlepper RSO type 3 do not line up with the roadwheels and the only way I'll be able to fit them is by fitting collars to line them up. Why not include these in the kit? Also the PE tracks are not very good! Yes, they look the part, but having to lift all those tiny teeth is far too taxing for people with poor eyesight. I'm not sure that PE in this scale is really necessary. The trails on the sFH 15cm Feldhaubitze 18 will not fit unless you perform major surgery on the location points to get them to fit. Parts fixed to the sprue are very heavy and need major cleaning up after removing. All in all I'm not overly impressed and will probably not buy anymore. The few that I have will have to be shelved until I can spend more time on rectifying the points I've outlayed.

Richard,

Thanks for Your notes....

First of all You have to remember that our kits made by a short run technology and this means that some areas (heavy fixes to sprues and necessarity of cleaning) can't be done in another way. As for etched tracks: We recommend some heating before use. Anyway most of the Long Run (high pressure) companies produce primitive tracks or rubber tracks, that don't represent real thing.... We made some kits with plastic tracks and got a negative feedback -Wthat's was a reason why we decided to produce etched ones instead of link'n'track ones made under low pessure (short run).

As for instructions: We do sketches as easy as possible to understand, but when You believe that more attention to details is needed - we'll try to give a little bit more details.

Sincerely Alexey.

http://www.acemodel.com.ua

Hi Alexey and thanks for your quick response. I understand the implications of short run kits and the advantages and disadvantages of production, but I do think you could pay a little more attention to the way things line up. As I said, the drive and rear wheels of the RSO do not line up with the road wheels and therefore fixing the tracks is almost impossible without moving the wheels out by a few mm's. Whilst I can see the advantage of PE for the tracks, much finer detail etc; it's still no help when you're an old duffer like me with shakey hands and poor eyesight. If you can address the location points on the instructions I'm sure it will be a great help. Are there any plans for British armoured cars of WW2 like the AEC, Coventry, Staghound etc? I'm sure these would prove succesful as British AC's of this period are in very short supply. Once again spaceba and all the best.

As for British arm. cars: Yes we plan one soon, but that one is not listed in Your message - check our site to see it in a future plans. As I know Staghound is available in plastic.

Sincerely Alexey.

http://www.acemodel.com.ua