No, not the Indochina plane but the resin vehicle I bought from Badger Games for the Sicario project a while ago and then ranted about a few posts back when I fell foul of random custom & excise duties.
The model comes as a resin cast block for the main cab plus a bag of metal additions for the wheels and axles, the lights, the front bumper, the footplates and various handrails, oh plus decals. The original manufacturer is Company B it would seem.
As you can see the casting is pretty basic but that’s OK I’m a pretty basic painter! There was very little flash on the resin and once cleaned off and given a wash it was ready to go. The metal pieces also had very little flash but cleaning up flash lines on the handrails was a bit of a trial as these really are very fiddly and even at the end I wasn’t totally pleased with them.
Given the fiddly nature of some of the bits I decided to undercoat first (black for the cab and grey for the rest), top coat most items and then assemble.
For the cab I used the Miniature Paints Royal Blue which I’ve used for all the Federal Police vehicles so far and seems to best represent the real thing as shown by Google Images. For the tyres Humbrol gloss black, gunmetal for the footplates and handrails and then a mix of red & blue for the flashing lights on top.
Fitting stuff together wasn’t quite as straight forward as I would hope. The front bumper pushes on but the recess wasn’t quite square so filing and swearing helped but not completely. The wheels fitted on the axle alright but the recess on the under chassis is ill defined so scraping out with the craft knife was required which meant the wheels ended up sitting too near the wheel arches. The real fiddle however was the handrails, these are very fine so trying to keep them straight as you fed them into the sockets on the body and not get super glued in the process was a challenge; what was particularly vexing was that the holes for the side handrails were missing on one side which given that I’d already painted the cab put me off trying to drill it and in fact I don’t think I had a drill fine enough. The problem with the foot plates was that there is no recess for them to go in so you have to literally butt them up to the side/rear and hold in place and let the super glue go off, the metal is soft so at least they took to a bit of bending into shape. Once done I gloss blacked the windows and essentially it’s ready to go.
I’m not sure whether I got the wrong decals or just plain lost them but the ‘SWAT’ decal wasn’t there but the decals I did have worked fine and the unique federal police decals that Badger Games made up for me last year came in very handy so no loss. Another piece of the Sicario jigsaw in place, got to bite the bullet now and buy all the buildings!
Overall not a bad little build and a fairly unique vehicle to have on the table – I don’t know of a UK manufacturer that does one but if there is one please tell me so I can swear really, really loud!
Westbury Wargamers 