Revell Challenger I 1:72

Review by: Geoff Coughlin (June 2011)

Thanks to Revell Germany for supplying our review sample: www.revell.de

Background

The British FV4030/4 Challenger 1, was the main battle tank (MBT) of the British Army from 1983 to the mid 1990s, when it was superseded by the Challenger 2. It is also currently used by the Jordanian Armed Forces as their main battle tank after heavy modifications. The variants for the Jordanian military are upgraded to Challenger 2 standards and are undergoing upgrades using an unmanned turret called the Falcon Turret.

Initial Assessment

You may well have seen the other two recent reviews of the Panzer IV and M 2 A2 Bradley, both also in 1:72 scale. They are really impressive little kits in this scale and this Challenger I is no different.

This is a really impressive bit of tooling with very fine levels of detail across the board. The images should speak for themselves and you can decide what you think, especially as armour is probably your area. So I offer a basic insight into this Revell kit that may or may not be new, but that it’s widely available will be good news to all of you that are interested in armour modelling in this scale.

The Package

6 sprues moulded in green plastic, a set of instructions, and small decal sheet make up the package.

Click to Enlarge/go back.

Sprue trees

You can see that the hull top is very clean and crisp, as is just about everything else. The tools for example are cleanly and accurately moulded onto the surface but will look excellent when spray painted and given a subtle wash and maybe filters (see your Techniques Bank for how to apply these weathering techniques) in keeping with the small scale.

The moulded detail throughout is good and, although I can’t give an opinion on accuracy, what you get certainly looks consistent with some of the images I have seen on YouTube and elsewhere. There’s some great footage of the Challenger on manoeuvres, in training and when operational so check out the reference sources above.

Other highlights include: the detail on the hull top, track links and one-piece gun barrel. There are some ejector pin mould-release circles left during the making of the kit, but these are well placed in out of the way or hidden locations. A nice touch.

The engine grills look fine for the scale and I can just see that they will look good after a wash and dry-brush (again, see your Techniques Bank for how to dry-brush).

The tracks are broken down into small sections that should allow you to pose them fairly naturally. In fact, if you add the side skirts them much of the track section along the upper run will be invisible, so what’s provided looks to be just fine in 1:72 scale.

There’s no flash or excess plastic on any of the parts, so this will help build time greatly.

Decals

There’s a small sheet with the respective numbers and unit badges for the options contained in the kit. These are:

• Challenger I 17/21 Lancers, BOAR, Exercise “Iron Hammer” 198
• Challenger I The Queen’s Royal Hussars IFOR, Bisnia-Hertzigowina, 1996

Instructions

These follow the usual Revell format with Revell colour references, parts and sprue layout diagrams followed by a 23-Stage build and finishing sequence. The sequence looks to be logical to me but of course you will want to leave off all the small, delicate parts like the aerials until near the end of the build to avoid damage.

The verdict

Highly Recommended.

Geoff C.