Emhar's 1/35 7.7cm Feldkanone 96 n/A
by Eugene Sautin

On the outset of war the staple German gun was the 77mm Feldkanone 96 n/A. The gun started its life without a shield and a recoil system, this changed when the French designed the 75mm. This gun participated in almost all of the major battles in WWI and proved to be a reliable gun for the German army. It was eventually outclassed by the new 77-mm FK 16 field gun but never totally replaced by it. During the war many changes were done to the guns thus many guns had different markings coloring and stowage. To read a lot more on this gun click here.

Click on the pictures for an enlarged version!

The kit comes in a small sized box like the Emhar 1/72 kits. The instructions are on the back, but you don’t really need them to assemble the cannon. The kit itself comes in one spruce accompanied by three soldiers. The cannon is molded in light grey hard plastic and the plastic is very easy to work with, I even find it more satisfactory than the standard Emhar hard plastic. The kit is very simple. So to make an accurate model you would need to super detail the gun. You need a good set of plans to do this and luckily this excellent site has them!

Assembly is very straightforward. All the parts have holes in the shield, so you can just snap the kit together with no glue like legos; this is not recommended because the parts can still fall off pretty easily. As mentioned above, this kit lacks almost all of the detail, you need to add a dialing sight, angle and traverse cranks, handles, seats, and make the barrel hollow; you can also open one or two of the hatches in the shield like I did. The guns often had stowage in the form of boxes and shovels. I don’t have stowage on the gun at the time I took the pictures of the finished model but my final diorama with the gun will have the stowage, and hopefully it will be on this site. Getting the barrel hollow is quite a chore and carving knifes are recommended but a simple Swiss army knife or its counterpart can get the job done if you have the skill.

Painting the cannon depends on what era is your cannon going to be, if it’s early 1914-1915 than it would be a light green grey, if its 1916-1917 Cambrai/ Somme/ Verdun then it would be field grey like mine, and if you want it to make it late 1918 than it would be in the bright coloring like the a7v sturmpanzers than you would need several colors, again consult the page on the gun on this site. The dial sight is painted gunmetal the seats and handles are painted wood even though the back seat should also have a lighter tone (I haven’t done it yet) a bit of dust can be sprinkled on the barrel and the wheels, the wheels can also be covered in mud. Also some guns had the breech painted steel. The kit comes with no markings but most cannons had some basic numbering on the back in the form of white numerals, some guns also had markings in the front also, for this consult a book on WWI artillery.

The soldiers are another story. First they are molded quite poorly and being one piece it is hard to convert or work with them. Second, they don’t really service the gun in any way; third the officer looks like an early 1914/1915 artillery commander while the two soldiers look a lot more WWII than WWI. Staying on the commander, his sword is too thick and he lacks all gear an artillery commander would have had, like binoculars. The two soldiers have very odd shaped helmets and their gear is WWII, while their uniforms are late war tunics, also the shell that they have is a generic WWII shell that looks nothing like the 77mm feldkanone shells. In short, you would need to do a lot of conversions to make the three soldiers accurate and it seems pointless, since it’s a lot easier to just convert the excellent ICM German figures into artillery men, since those soldiers aren’t molded whole.

You are able to buy this it from most well-stocked firms, including Hannants and Jadar.
 

The kit is too simple to be top notch and the soldiers are a complete no go, but as often proven in WWI modeling it is easier to detail a simple kit than to fix a kit that is detailed but has many errors. That said I am not wasteful and I think you can find a place were the soldiers can be used.