The Soviet 122mm M30 howitzer was one of the major artillery pieces of the Red Army in World War II, and it was to provide good service throughout the war and for many years after.
This model comes in a dozen or so parts, which go to make up one gun. The plastic is very soft, and the precision of the parts is not particularly precise, so this was a real challenge to put together. For anyone not intimately familiar with this weapon, the first objective is to discover how it all fits together, because there are no instructions or clear picture, and it is not intuitive. In the end we resorted to using the instructions for a model of the same gun made by PST as a guide to what might go where. However even when that had been decided, parts fitted poorly and often the join proved to be too loose to stay, so requiring gluing. Without instruction it was also difficult to decide the best order for assembly, and we found it a very difficult task to get parts to fit together and stay together. The breech mechanism in particular has several separate parts such as wheels, but these do not attach as such, and have to be glued in what seems like the appropriate place. The resulting model is extremely fragile.
There is also a roughness to this model, with some parts apparently not straight when they should be, and rough edges that need trimming to improve the look. Detail is not too bad considering the complexity of the gun, but inevitably it is a compromise. The overall look is pretty close to the original, but this is a frustrating kit to put together, and the final model is not good enough to reward this effort. In essence complex machinery such as this is much better done in hard plastic, and better kits from other manufacturers underline the point. There is little to recommend this kit as a result.