I grabbed myself three boxes of these Battlefront kits as part of a British Mechanised Company list I’m building for Team Yankee, supplied at an excellent discount by those wonderful folks at Wayland Games. I could have gone with Warrior IFVs to give the formation a bit of extra punch, but for me the FV432 just seems more era-appropriate for Team Yankee. It’s a fault!
Contents
The box contains five plastic sprues to build the aforementioned configurations, along with a set of six commander figures and eight mortar crew (enough to outfit four vehicles). It’s worth noting that although the vehicles themselves are the standard – and excellent – Battlefront plastic, the commanders are resin and the mortar gunners metal. There are no decals or unit cards included, so if you want them, you’ll have to source them from somewhere else.
The kits can be assembled in three different ways: as the standard FV432 APC, the Swingfire anti-tank version, and a mortar carrier variant. I’ve only built the generic APC so far, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of difference with the other ones (a tiny turret for one, a mortar tube and crew for the other).
Assembly
The assembly goes together really well, with the pieces being cleanly cast and having great definition. A little care needs to be taken with the roof plate, however: the piece needs to be held in place until the glue is properly set, otherwise it has a tendency to peel away slightly at the back of the hull.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve only built the APC variant, but looking at the mortar carrier assembly, I can see the fitting of the crewmen being a little tricky: they look like they’ll need to be braced against the sides of the firing aperture, and in this case care will be needed to avoid flooding the detail of the figure with superglue.
Summary
An excellent kit with an easy assembly procedure, it’s just a shame that there’s no decals to finish off the models. The finished product looks kind of generic and boxy but, at least for me, that’s part of the charm!