Lancer Miniatures 1/72 T-20 Armoured Tractor

Feeding my minor obsession with getting the 'perfect' Komsomolet armoured tractor I took the advice of Greebs (a reader of this blog) and bought a Lancer Miniatures T-20. It wasn't a big outlay - especially compared to the North Star T-20 kit I featured in my last post on the subject - so I was easily able to sneak it under the wife's spending radar!

It arrived very promptly and here are some snaps of it...

The Lancer resin T-20 hull compared to the white metal MMS T-20.

Excuse the muddy looking photos - but generally I was quite pleased with the product when you consider it was just £5.50. It is certainly better quality that the Shellhole Scenics T-20 (review here) and is about on par with the SHQ version of this little vehicle (review here). In the accompanying photo I have placed the resin Lancer T-20 hull component next to that of the MMS T-20 hull for comparison.

The Lancer is a gnat's hair larger than the MMS - which is understandable as the Lancer T-20 is supposed to be true 1/72 scale while the MMS is 1/76 scale - but as you can see the difference is barely discernible. As far as I can tell the Lancer's dimensions are just a tiny bit small for this scale which is why it seems compatible with the 20mm MMS model, but with such a small vehicle we are talking about fractions of millimetres differences here.

I know I keep including this reference photo, but this picture really does give an
excellent sense of just how small this 50hp armoured tractor was.

I am now of a mind that - really - any differences in scale from 1/76 to 1/72 are going to be negligible so I am going to clean up and paint both the Lancer and the MMS T-20s to see what they look like next to one of my finished trucks and some infantry figures. I only need three of these vehicles for my Finnish collection anyway so if they look OK I will probably complete the unit by making up the SHQ model.

T-20 Dimension comparisons:
1/1 Scale: Length: 3.45m | Width: 1.86m | Height: 1.58m
1/72 Scale: Length: 4.79cm | Width: 2.58cm | Height: 2.19cm
1/76 Scale: Length: 4.54cm | Width: 2.45cm | Height: 2.07cm

The general quality of the model is OK, there are a few bubbles on the resin component and the metal tracks have some gaps where the metal casting has failed. But for a Fiver I'm not moaning. I have to say that I had never heard of Lancer Miniatures before, so an additional thank you goes to Greebs for introducing me to a new source of interesting WW2 vehicle models.

Another photo which gives you an idea of how small these vehicles were in
reality. These Germans stand beside a captured Soviet T-20, this will allow
me to make a good comparison with some 1/72 scale figures.
(Picture credit: Adam Salieri - salieri16000.dobroni.pl)

Link to the Lancer Miniatures website.