Still waiting for my spare part but i thought i would have a look at fixing the wheels..
Now my moans about Italeri's obsession with screws and nuts and bolts is probably boring people by now but.....
the wheels are held on to the axel buy a nut and a screw fitted to the wheel hub during construction. the Nut is recessed down a hole and is a tight fit
The nut is 1.4mm so its small. You need tweezers to pick it up....so of course 2 of the 4 nuts supplied pinged out of the tweezers into another dimension, never to be seen again. So now i have 4 wheels and 2 nuts. Next problem is the plastic socket spanner they supply just rounds off because the wall thickness is only 0.5mm in order for it to fit into the wheel nut recess.
I bought a 1.4mm tap and some 12BA brass nuts and taped the threads out to 1.4mm
the tap is out of focus but it still worked
I then had to make a very thin wall socket to fit the nut and still fit in the wheel out of some 3mm alloy tube drilled out 2.3mm and then using a spare nut to press out the hex head shape.
after all that i could fit a wheel
You can just see how little room there is between the wheel nut recess and the wheel nut
Now Italeria ,what was the point of any of this ? A plastic stub axel and a plastic cap glued on the end to retain the wheel would be better, stronger and easier ? in fact the whole thing is so fragile like this there is no point at all in allowing the wheels to rotate on a static model.
I would go so far as to say that on a lot of the model having slotted screws holding the suspension on for example is actually less realistic than a moulded hex head in the part.
In truth this is not really a moan but the point of doing a public thread/build is to allow others to see the good and the bad so i would be failing in not pointing these sorts of things out.