1:16 Sd.Kfz. 251 - Corrected Road Wheels 14 Complete Wheels (for Das Werk Kits)

The running gear that carried the whole weight of the machine

The rear part of the Hanomag stood on an overlapping arrangement of road wheels. The disks alternated with one another, sat on needle bearings and carried a pressed-on rubber tire around the circumference. The solution spread the pressure on the track over a large area and freed travel over a rough road of hard shocks, but at a cost that the workshops cursed: to change an inner disk meant taking apart the outer ones as well. In winter mud, which froze between the disks, such an arrangement could immobilize a whole vehicle by morning.

A set of fourteen pieces

The package contains fourteen complete wheels with adjusted dimensions and shape, as the name states. The correction concerns mainly the profile of the disk and the offset of the hub, that is the places where an injection mold has to give way to the direction of ejection. The lightening holes are therefore open all the way through and the edges of the tire keep a sharp transition between metal and rubber.

Building in the large 1:16

Given the size of the parts it pays to glue the running gear row by row and let each one cure before the next comes. The disks can then be aligned against a ruler laid on the lower edge, so that the result will not be wavy. In color it tends to be rewarding to separate the metal disk from the tire: the rubber will take a gray a shade lighter, and a deposit of dust in the gaps between the wheels gives the running gear depth. The set is reckoned for the Sd.Kfz. 251 kit of the Das Werk brand. In scope it stands above the tire sets of the same range, which corresponds to the number of parts it replaces.