The Old Crow vehicles are very good value - at the time of writing, they are £5 for a main battle tank and £4 for APCs or medium tanks.
The kits are cast in a very nice resin, and are virtually bubble-free (I just had to pop a blob of epoxy in a few on the corners of the grav plates, but only 2 or 3 on each kit). They are sanded smooth on the base, and have presumably been given a quick wash during production - they don't feel sticky like some resin kits I've bought, and the moulds are obviously well-filled when casting, as there were no sunken areas where the hull sections fit together. On the majority of the kits there was no flash to clean up, and including a quick scrub with a toothbrush, they were all ready for assembly in less than half an hour. I stuck them using araldite epoxy resin - I'm sure superglue/cyanoacrylate would have worked just as well, but I prefer epoxy resin for most kits, just because the thicker mix helps smooth over uneven surfaces, giving a better bond.
Assembly is simple - the Glaive APC (seen above with a section of GZG NAC Marine deploying from the rear hatch) consists of a lower hull section and a main body, with 3 optional white metal fixtures for the top; a simple hatch, a 4-round missile launcher ot a remote gun turret. I've left mine off for now, and will attach one when most of the painting is complete.
The Gladius medium tank has several turret options which are chosen when ordering. I opted for the missile turret, but as turrets can also be ordered separately, I can always get a couple of different versions another day. The missile turret arrived with two different types of missile pod, either rectangular or angled. The rectangular pods come as 8 and 4-round units which attach to either side of the main turret mount. The angled pods (which I chose to use) come as 6 and 3-round units which attach to the turret mount in the same way. These angled pods have covers over the mouths of the launch tubes (or perhaps it's the noses of the warheads poking out), while the rectangular pods just have open launch tubes. The hull of the Gladius comes in two parts, upper hull and the grav lower hull (the same as the Glaive in fact).
The Sabre heavy tank has a one-piece hull, and the turret comes as 2 resin pieces (turret and a wide, inverted truncated cone mounting post) and a choice of 2 metal gun barrels - a single cannon or twin lighter cannon mount. The more observant among you may have noticed that the tank lacks a gun barrel at present - I dropped it while preparing the models, and only managed to find it after I'd done my gluing session!
I also have a turret base (only £1!) which will serve as a static defence turret. The Gladius tank turrets fit this turret base, and the same turret size is also used on several other heavy APCs in the Old Crow range. With extra turrets costing only £1-£2, it would be easy to create a static defence line for very little cost. The turret I have used here is a multi-missile turret, but I will be adding the 2 sets of white metal paired 4-round missile pods after the main painting is completed. The quality of the fit is so good that they simply pop into place and stay at whatever angle you put them.
Overall, I'd place the quality of these kits equal or above that of the DLD vehicles - far less cleaning up to do, and less assembly too, and much cheaper (though the exchange rate may have something to do with that).
These vehicles will be finished with a camo scheme of green and grey patches over the brown base coat, with a few final details such as ID numbers etc. Somewhere I have a box of 1/72 scale stowage, some of which will no doubt make its way onto these and other 15mm vehicles in my collection, but that's something for another day...
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