Today the box arrived. And what a BOX!!! This thing is HUGE. It is so big that I really don’t know how I’m going to make an excuse for having it at home taking up space.

At first glance the kit is amazing. The wheels, sprockets Idler are the size of a 1/35 Stuart .

I have to take everything out of the huge box and have a long and detailed look on everything. The box is like a Matrioshka. Boxes inside boxes and plastic parts so big that I’m wondering how much glue and paint is going into this one.

Sure I’ll have the build log here but this one is gonna be slow, really slow

The Fiat-Ansaldo M13/40 was an Italian medium tank ("M" for Medio (medium) according to the Italian tank weight standards at the time: 13 tonnes was the scheduled weight and 1940 the initial year of production), designed to replace the Fiat L3, the Fiat L6/40 and the Fiat M11/39 in the Italian Army at the start of World War II.

The design was influenced by the British Vickers 6-Ton and was based on the modified chassis of the earlier Fiat M11/39. Indeed, M11/39 production was cut short in order to get the M13/40 into production. Although designated a medium tank, the M13/40 was close to contemporary light tanks in armor but not in firepower.

The kit

It’s a recent release from Italeri under the form of a limited edition kit. It’s quite cheap compared with the recent Tamiya or Dragon releases and upon the first look, it’s quite good.

The only thing I really dislike are the vinyl tracks. They have good detail and are very close to the real thing, but I prefer "the real thing". That’s why I got a set of Friul tracks for it.

The only detailing kit I found for this tank was from Eduard and dedicated to the Tamiya model. I prefer aber sets over the Eduard offers, so I didn’t order the PE set yet (I say yet because I know how the process works in my mind and I never say never).