Panzer Art has been making resin and photo-etched brass detail items for several years now. I recently acquired some sets for my Tamiya Sd.Kfz. 9 Famo. One of these items is Panzer Art’s grill (called cooler mask on their site). The other set is for the Dragon Sd.Kfz. 7 series which I will review separately. Inside a resealable plastic bag with a cardboard header, we find one resin part, exquisitely molded.
One thing to notice is that the grill work is open revealing the radiator behind it. For comparison, I pulled out two Tamiya grills I have. One is stock and the other has had some updating. One of the things during updating was the lack of depth on the Tamiya part. Below, we see front and rear view of the Panzer Art item compared to the stock Tamiya part it directly replaces.
The part is easy to remove from its mold gate but it doesn’t have the two locator tabs on the bottom so care will be needed in placing it on the model. The improvement is quite noticeable. There wasn’t much shrinkage (extremely slight) and the Famo logo is better than the PE replacement from Part. Opening the grills isn’t difficult to do but tedious. This is a time saver.
