1/56 Armourfest - a Panzer 38(t) & a Renault R35

I still building up my France 1940 CoC forces and because I got a discount voucher with free shipping from Warlord I promptly placed an order. Picked out the Panzer 38(t) (included decals and hit markers), the Renault R35 (it too had decals and hit markers), an early war German 75mm IG and crew and a French Hotchkiss MG Team. The order arrived promptly ans was well packed.

Just looking at the two tanks on this post and I can say we cover the two extremes of the spectrum with them!

The Pz 38(t) is a beautiful injection mould kit. It is cleverly designed and assembly is a breeze. The design allows you to glue 'tab areas' of almost every part meaning no oozing glue on the kits exterior. In many circumstances parts will only fit one way so you can't balls anything up (good for me!).

I choose to button my vehicle up with early war optional part options. I deviated from the instructions in that I did not add the tracks to the drive train until after I had painted everything, this allowed to to paint the hull, the two sets of wheels and the track separately and then I assembled all these parts after giving a good paint finish! The paint scheme is the early war one, panzer grey with brown camouflage applied (I airbrushed the base coat and hand painted the rest, I omitted painting the tyres for gaming I find that acceptable and one day I'll apply some weathering to the vehicle which will cover this anyway). I used a minimum of decals (I still say transfers!). This is one cool bit of kit!

My only complaint is the kit is almost too good for gaming there are quite a few fine bits of detail just waiting to get broken off!

Can't wait to get this one into action!

Now to the Renault R35 which I have base coated but not finished yet. This is a resin and metal kit and its nice that a crewman was included. I selected this vehicle as with the Pz 38(t) it came with decals and hit markers. The decals will be especially useful as I have a couple of Mad Bob Miniatures vehicles they will come in handy for.

Overall the R35 will look good on the war game table top but the resin casts are pretty rough looking and when rested together the running gear assemblies have an odd looking inward camber, I'll have to research this and may need to add a couple of shims in when assembling to straighten this up. A set of decals are included but without any details on how they should be applied and there is no painting instructions either, thank heavens for Mr Google!

The R35 awaiting completion...

Next I'll write up our CoC game from last Monday night and tomorrow night (breaking our fortnightly rule for once) we are getting together again for yet more CoC, we want to really get these rules clear in our minds before going to something else!