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Unimodel 1/72nd BT-5

By Matt Bittner

History

The BT-2 – the predecessor to the BT-5 – was based on the Christie M.1940 design. It could not meet the demands of the Soviet army in terms of armament and engine power so at the beginning of 1932 design work began on what would be called the BT-5. Somewhat based on the BT-2, it was also an improvement. The hull was lengthened by 2.25 cm due to the engine and the 20-K 45mm tank gun was used. There were two turrets initially designed for the BT-5, one cylindrical and the other elliptical.

The BT-5 first saw combat during the Spanish Civil War, later fighting during the conflict in the Khasan lake area as well as the Khalkin-Gol River. The type also saw combat during the Russian-Finish war of 1939-1940.

When The Great Patriotic War (WW2) broke out, the BT-5 was seriously outdated and outclassed and the majority was lost during the first few months of the war. Even so, the BT-5 soldiered on long enough to take part of the final defeat of the Japanese in Manchuria in 1945. All total there were approximately 1884 BT-5 tanks produced.

The Kit

The Unimodel (UM) kit of the BT-5 consists of 99 injected parts and thirteen photoetch pieces. The kit comes with markings for three specific machines, but there are enough extras that one is able to build practically any BT-5 using the kit decals (minus any with specific Cyrillic sayings). Not only machines serving with the Soviet army but also serving during the Spanish Civil War.

The detail level on this kit is outstanding, and the injected link and length tracks are awesome. The only things missing from this kit are lenses for the lights and a chain that appears in almost all photos of BT-5s.

Construction

All in all this is a very simple kit to assemble. Not many problems to look out for and with the proper amount of dry fit you can get away with hardly any seam filling at all.

Initial construction consists of putting all the hull pieces – and almost all parts that are attached to the hull – together. I ended up gluing everything together for the hull except for the lights and the exhaust. Those I left off until the end. Everything fits together pretty well, but just be sure to dry fit. Some parts take a little more care than others to get a close to perfect fit.

Once most of the parts were together – minus the grill and baffle on the rear of the hull – I slapped some black paint on the inside. I also painted the 'slats' under the grill (parts 35C) black before adding the grill just to block out any and all light. The toughest time I had was bending and fitting the grill (photoetch part 36C) to the hull. The photoetch is a little thicker than normal and even after annealing the photoetch it was tough to bend into the right shape. One idea would be to make a solid part to bend the photoetch grill over. That would definitely help.

I ended up leaving the photoetch tow hook loops off, as I didn't like how the photoetch looked. To me they appeared too small, thin and frail. I couldn't figure out an alternative, so I just left them off.

The turret went together extremely well. One thing to watch out for is the rear door (part 51D). I ended up sanding the edge without the hinges too much and had to fill it out again with sheet plastic. This is all part of the dry fitting phase I keep mentioning.

Final Assembly and Painting

Once the entire hull was together I sprayed the first coat of Testor's Acryl Russian Armor Green. This was done not only to the hull, but the wheels that were left on the sprue as well. After the paint dried, I painted the rubber rims of the wheels scale black and glued the wheels together.

I brushed Future on the turret prior to adding the decals. Once the decals were on I applied another coat of Future to seal them in. Once everything was dry I started weathering with a dry brush of lightened green oil paint over all of the high points, such as hinges, handles, edges, etc. Weathering then continued with a Burnt Umber oil wash over the entire tank. I prefer doing this over the flat base because the oil seeps into the paint, resulting in a nice effect.

From here I used pastel chalks to 'dust' the bottom of the tank body and all tires. I then sprayed dull coat over the entire model and glued the wheels to the body. The tracks were also glued on. I also added the painted exhaust and light fixtures to the tank. After everything was dry, another dull coat was sprayed to hide any possible gloss marks from the glue. Another coat of pastel chalk was added to the bottom of the tank, also dusting the tracks. A thin coat of oil was applied over the white decals to tone them down (although not shown in the images).

The last part of construction was gluing in the MV Lenses I used as lights.

Conclusion

This is an extremely nice small-scale armor kit. It goes together well and really looks like a BT-5. The UM kit is highly recommended. My next ones, though, will use the just released Part photoetch sets as they include a new grill for the back of the upper hull, and Part brass is sure to be a lot easier to work with than the one supplied in the kit.