Actual Thunderers

So these are the last of the 'moments of weakness' acquisitions from the DKK facebook page.  The vendor was floggin' 'em cheap as he was pretty sure that they were knock offs.

Now I've held forth before on why we have a moral duty to buy original products from their title holders; the corollary being that to keep buying knock offs will put the actual creators of our hobby stuff out of business.  And that if that were the case, we the tax payers would end up supporting those creators and their dependants etc.

Plus illegally copying other peoples work/products is reprehensible in it's own right and therefore using these dirty things is really on a bar with pirate DVDs or other knock off goods.

So what makes these knock off's ? some of the panels are thin, the interior of the castings is not clean like a FW casting, it's blobby like a six year old's craft project.  And whilst they came with track sides, FW ones come with a complete LRMBT kit including accessory sprue.  And these don't even have hatches on the cupolas.

I had to fashion the bottom from plasticard, along with the front glacis plate.  There were a lot of gaps to fill and an area across the front which I tidied up with a section of plasticard 'u' section.  Three spare parts from the chimera kit lend a more heavily riveted look to the front glacis.

So what's to be done ?  I'm undecided at the moment - I was going to turn them over to FW, but then I built them.  The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, that well known Combat Engineer unit, could do with them.  Ho Hum.  When I surrendered the knock off DKK Death Rider Commissar to FW, I was able to give them the name of the e-Bay vendor.  So they had a chance to follow the trail back to the counterfitter.

The guy in the FB group gave them up because he wasn't too pleased with them.  He doesn't deserve an unsolicited interruption and the trail back to the actual counterfitter is likely tortuous and/or broken anyway. Awkward...