A history of Airfix HO/OO AFV kits - part 13 - 1971

This year saw three new kits - all of them tanks.
The Chieftain was at the time entering service with the British Army, and the kit captures the mighty beast rather well.

A very nice Chieftain built by Erhntly - photo stolen from his excellent blog.

The Crusader has long been one of my personal favourites.  It looks very racy and elegant - even if we all know it was a far from perfect tank in service!  The kit makes up as either a MkII (with 2pdr gun and additional MG turret) or a MkIII with (6pdr gun).

My MkIIIs are all the Hasegawa kits, so here are a couple of my MkIIs.  The Airfix hull is slightly too long but it's nothing I lose any sleep over.

The Panzer IV tank was another wonderfully useful release.  It took me a while to get round to owning one as being a Series 2 kit it always seemed rather expensive!  Eventually though, I stumped up the required £0.46 and built it as an F-2 with the long barrelled 75mm gun.  An additional barrel was included to enable less power crazed modellers to built the short 75-armed F-1 version.

This Pz IV serving with 20 Panzer Grenadier Division benefits from added turret armour.

A very standard F-2 - a veteran of many campaigns this is on the strength of 10 PD.