Spider tank, Spider tank; or why not to buy recasts

So yesterday I got a package all the way from China, which took over 3 weeks to get to me- a little spider tank. Looking for a little mech to use when I start playing Secrets of the Third Reich and completely in love with this build I decided to try to track down a kit. Which I kind of did and here we get to the main point of this post- recasts. I was pretty damn certain the kit I was getting off of eBay was a recast, but I wasn't really aware of all the issues which come with that when I ordered it. But lo, when the package turned up yesterday and indeed it is a recast. Now I don't really know much about quality of kits, coming almost entirely from a little Games Workshop hole, but I can tell there are issues with this kit. Most of these pictures are after I've already started making the kit ready, but you can see the issues pretty clearly.

HUGE sticky out bits on the front of the hull and in the recess where the gun goes and lots of weird lines and pits.

Very thin leg armour plates, some essentially transparent in places.

The engine block has joints where the legs are supposed to attach, which I'd imagine are supposed to correspond to the gaps on the underside of the hull for the legs. However, this is not the case, with the joints on the engine block and the gaps in the hull being way out of line with each other. The engine block also had a very thick layer of resin left over on the flat side which needed quite a bit of cutting & sanding down. The same was true of the gun section.

Credit where credit's due however- the leg pieces and the detailing on the hull are actually pretty nice, at least to my untrained eyes, despite weird black bits embedded in the hull...

All in all, for £10 I don't suppose it's too bad- I'm certainly still going to paint it up and use it. But next time I want a model I'll know to save my pennies rather than let my haste get the better of me. Anyway, back to the Rasenmaeher next post- the patterns are more or less done, so onto the detailing and weathering!