DLD Kamodo AFV Review

I started building these DLD Kamodo vehicles months ago - see my earlier post from June! I've finally got them finished, and also built a third one which I saved so I could do a more in-depth review of the kit.
Here you see all the parts for a Kamodo ICV (Infantry Combat Vehicle) after trimming/sanding and a good scrub with a toothbrush & washing up liquid. The collection of small parts on the right includes smoke launchers, gunnery sight, periscope, IFF transponder and attachment ring, turret hatch cover, gun barrel and 4 stowage brackets. They come still attached to a thin sheet of resin so you can be sure you've got them all, but they are a bit fiddly to trim. The wheels appear to have been copied from the Revell 1/72 scale Fuchs APC, but as these are some of the best wheels I've come across on a model, that's not a complaint! Some parts are pre-assembled; the gun barrel and the turret (you can't see from this picture, but the turret pin is already fixed in place underneath so that you can guarantee it sits in the right place on the main hull).

The main hull and turret had a few small resin granules scattered alongside detail areas, presumably from small bubbles of air getting trapped when the original mould were made, but these were few and far between. Overall, the quality of the castings was excellent, especially the detail on the wheels (though more cleaning up was required here.

What I wasn't quite so impressed with was the amount of bubbling around the back of the vehicle. I assume that it is cast in a mould standing on its nose, which is why all the bubbles have accumulated at the back. They'd been poorly filled with a slightly granular filler, and I ended up re-filling them. I should point out that the vehicle has been designed so that the main hatch covers most of the rear, which helps hide all the bubbles in the middle part, and on the whole I was very happy with the quality of finish.

A close-up of some of the bubbles/filling. Detail on the rear of the model is not as clear as on the sides or top. It might have been better to have the rear stowage boxes as separate items to attach; that way, they'd have had better detail, and would have helped cover up some more of the bubbles.

The basic hull & turret assembled. Wheels have been left off to aid painting, as suggested on the instructions. You can see the collection of detail parts mounted on top of the turret, and two of the stowage brackets alongside the turret. I found that the stowage bin on the turret rear didn't really look right when attached, but it has been attached correctly. The instructions are very good, clear and concise on the whole. Just a couple of the parts were hard to differentiate - I ended up looking at the pictures of the 25mm scale versions on the DLD web site to make certain I had them in the right places!

Another view, this time from the other side. The number of tiny pieces to attach seemed unnecessary, I'd have thought that the stowage brackets and the IFF transponder and the ring that it sits in could all have been moulded on without too much loss in detail. I've left the turret hatch off for the time being, as it is just a plain domed circle with no other detail. I'm going to give it a better one, either making one from plasticard or using a spare vehicle hatch from another kit (Old Crow APC or a JB Models M113 ACAV seem the right size). It will probably be fixed in an open position, with a crewman peeping out.

The finished item plus a part-squad of GZG NAC dismounts. You can see that once it has been painted, the cleaned up rear of the hull looks fine. The turret stowage bin still looks slightly odd, but the painting does help bring everything together.

A view from the front. I will probably add more detail to these, including some stowage (jerry cans, bedding rolls), and probably some small gun barrels for the little blisters on the side of the hull (these are supposed to be built-in gun mounts for suppressive fire). The smoke launchers on the front faces of the turret are a little disappointing, so may get replaced with new ones made from bundles of short brass rod scraps.

I also have a Kamodo HFS (Heavy Fire Support?) to support my two ICVs...

Overall quality and ease of construction was much the same as the ICV.

The smoke launchers were much better than those on the ICV.

My rating for these kits will be a B-. Finished appearance is very good, and amount of detail is great, but construction is fiddly at times despite good instructions. I'm pleased with the finished result, they're a fine addition for a near-future force.

*Additional note: I've had a couple of queries now on whether DLD are still in business. I don't actually know - his web site is still up & running, but I have heard from someone else that orders are taking a while to get processed. I was lucky enough to get my 3 vehicles second hand, so I don't have any direct experience of ordering from DLD. I'd suggest that you drop DLD an e-mail direct from the contact button on their web site.

Stoat armoured car

Here is my latest toy car re-paint - a Matchbox Rollamatic "Stoat" armoured scout car.


The Stoat was one of a number of fictional armoured vehicles that Matchbox released in the 1970s/80s. All the "Rollamatics" had moving parts which rotated as they travelled along - see also my "Badger" command vehicle.


All the vehicles had that very '50s/'60s Cold War sort of look like so many of the UK or Russian vehicles of that time. Silver headlights and red brakelights added by my Dad when I was a small boy!


The "Rollamatic" feature was that the little man on the top would rotate as the wheels turned. After disassembly, you can see how it all worked.


The little man did have a head and a pair of binoculars at one time, but lost them many years ago when I tried to remove him with a pair of pliers so that some of my 1/72 scale toy soldiers could stand inside. All I managed to do was cause him horrendous injury, but the remains of his body stayed firmly wedged in place! My other toy soldiers had to continue fighting on foot...


After paint stripping the body shell, it received an undercoat of £ shop grey primer. I didn't try to strip the chassis as the axle was fixed in place, and I'd have melted the wheels off!

There is so much detail cast onto the vehicle that I decided not to add anything extra, though at some stage I might drill out the aerial mount next to the hatch and insert an antenna made from a guitar string.

The Stoat received a pretty standard modern UK colour scheme; Humbrol 75 matt bronze green, drybrushed with Humbrol 86 light olive green to bring out the detail. Camo stripes are black, and the whole vehicle received a light drybrush of Matt 93 desert yellow to give it a suitably used look. I find that the desert yellow looks pretty good on most vehicles, it gives a nice road-dusty effect but without looking too harsh.

Headlights were painted in with GW mithril silver and the vision blocks are Humbrol 104 oxford blue with a Humbrol 25 blue highlight. The tyres were touched up with matt black to cover any rogue patches of the grey undercoat or the green from the hubcaps.

I like the stowage! Pioneer tools have Matt 29 dark earth handles with matt 61 light grey blades, with a hint of GW chainmail around the working points where wear would occur. The fire extinguisher is very old GW woodland green (I've had it for about 20 years!) with a GW chainmail end. The hinges for all the various hatches had a few dabs of chainmail where the paint will have rubbed off as they are opened.

Although the Stoat may seem slightly oversized when placed alongside 15mm GZG NAC marines, it fits in very well with my DLD Kamodo AFVs, as you can see below. Review of the DLD vehicles (+ more photographs) to follow next time!

More colonists

A couple more GZG colonists completed, in this case a both female.

On the left we have a GW blood red jacket, shaded with Vallejo sepia ink. The collar is Humbrol 29 matt dark earth with a matt 64 light grey drybrush. Trousers are Humbrol 25 blue with a dash of white added for the highlighting. Hair is Humbrol 93 desert yellow with a Vallejo sepia ink wash and Vallejo bonewhite highlights.

The other has Vallejo charred brown trousers and Humbrol 93 desert yellow jacket, both washed with Vallejo sepia ink. At this scale, the original result was too subtle and just blended into an overall brown when viewed at normal gaming distances, so the jacket received a lot of brybrushing with desert yellow and then with Vallejo bonewhite. The collar is Humbrol dark grey with a light grey drybrush.

Predators

When I saw these little chaps, I just had to have them - they're so cute! OK, that's perhaps not the most important criterion when you're after some figures to represent fearsome headhunting aliens, but I don't care!

These are LKM/QRF pack SF08 Skullhunters - or Predators to you and me. For your £2.25 (about $1.50?) you get 8 figures, all different poses. Some poses aren't as good as others, and the sculpting is fairly basic in places (they all tend to have hands like bunches of bananas), but for value for money they're fantastic! I'd say that the good poses definitely outweigh the poor. They come equipped with a variety of weapons as seen in Predator and Predator 2. Most have the shoulder-mounted plasma caster, a couple have the extending spears, 2 have their helmets off to reveal their cute little roaring faces. They required very little cleaning up, virtually no flash and only very small mould-lines. The bases were nicely rounded and pretty smooth underneath, so no need to re-mount them on washers.

This skull-gripping, roaring guy has to be my favourite. OK, the hand gripping the skull is the most banana-like of the lot, but he has so much character!

This one has a nice extending spear, and you can see his shoulder-mounted plasma caster.

Not too sure about this pose. It looks like he's queueing for a bus.

Another of the not-quite-so-good poses. I assume he's in combat, but could just be closing a door.

I think this might be the boss. He looks very cool and collected, contemptuous of the pitiful humans that he is about to hunt...

It's a nice touch to have one using his wrist-comp. Perhaps he's re-setting his camouflage field...

This one might be aiming his plasma-caster. The helmet isn't quite as good as some of the others (very large nose!?) and he's a bit club-handed on his right side. This looks like a minor casting problem rather than poor sculpting though, and it isn't very noticeable. It's a pity that there isn't a pose lunging the other way with extending wrist blades out.

This is a great pose too, the plasma-caster is very prominent, and the whole figure is very aggressive.

Painting notes: After a black base coat, I painted the flesh first, as I knew it would be pretty messy. Humbrol 93 desert yellow provided the base, followed by a wash of Vallejo 72.091 sepia ink, drybrush of Humbrol 93, then a final highlight of Vallejo 72.034 bonewhite. Armour and helmets were painted with a mix of GW chainmail and Humbrol matt75 bronze green to give a fairly dark finish. This was followed by a highlight of chainmail/mithril silver. Their hair was painted with Vallejo 72.045 charred brown. Those with their helmets off received a dab of white on the end of their teeth, and a tiny dab of watered down red in their mouths.

Overall grade for these figures: B+

A good range of figures with more hits than misses. Sculting isn't as impressive as some manufacturers, but clean casting gives a good result when painted, and value for money is fantastic.

SWAT Team

I recently got around to painting my Rebel Minis SWAT team. Overall I was rather disappointed with these figures. Although most of the poses are nice, with good detail (even down to a cross-hatched texture on the handgrips of holstered pistols!), the quality of the castings was poor, and some of the weapons are unidentifiable. For sci-fi figures this isn't such a problem, but for someone using modern small arms, I do think you should be able to see what they are holding.

There are a couple of odd choices - I think that the sniper figure would have been better in a kneeling position and the commander appears to be wearing a sun hat! I think that this was the LA SWAT team pack, but although it is sunny in LA, it's a bit out of keeping with the rest of the team.

Although there was little or no flash, several of the figures suffered from very bad mould lines - see the commander below, with the mould-lines highlighted with red arrows. The bases were also very large and rather scruffy compared with most of the other Rebel Minis that I have.

I felt that I couldn't use the commander as he was, so a head swap with a GZG separate head was required. I decided that a breather mask looked quite good, and was a suitable size match. The pistol was trimmed down, the original having been so thick that it looked like he was holding a brick, and the base was cut down and filed thinner before gluing onto one of my usual M6 washer bases. Here you can see the modified figure alongside a fresh-from-the-packet friend.

A rear view of the commander - is that supposed to be an M4 assault carbine slung over his shoulder?

Three other members of the team. Left to right they have MP5 (?), M4 or M16, unidentifiable weapon (possibly some sort of shotgun?). Humbrol matt 33 black basecoat was followed by Humbrol 32 dark grey drybrush over assault vests, helmets, weapons, boots and kneepads. Trousers and sleeves are Humbrol 105 Oxford blue with Humbrol 25 blue drybrush. Flesh is my own flesh mix with a GW flesh wash to shade. Visors/goggles are GW enchanted blue (I have 2 post from many years ago when their colour matching was very poor - these are so different that I can use one as a base and the other to highlight!).

SWAT in action against some LKM Skullhunters (ie. Predators).

Overall rating for these figures: C-

Great poses and detail, but let down by poor casting and unidentifiable weaponry. A good result when finished, but they required a lot of work to get there compared to most other figures I have.

Final note: I have had a check on Rebel Minis site more recently, and it looks like the figures that I bought are no longer available. I think that they have changed the castings for both their LA SWAT team and their standard SWAT team - in fact it looks like some of the same figures appear in both.

Musings on paintbrushes...

A few days ago, I decided to have a bit of a sort out. My paintbrushes were scattered between at least 5 different boxes, so I thought that I should try and rationalise them. I came up with these candidates for disposal...

I haven't a clue what happened to the bristly end of the middle brush! Why on earth did I even keep this bit? The ferrule on the bottom one snapped during cleaning, so it ended up being used to stir paint. The second from bottom has no bristles left -again, why did I keep it?

The top couple of brushes (Humbrol Senator) aren't really any use now. I'm not sure what happened to the top one, and the bottom one has been drybrushed into oblivion.

At the opposite end of the scale is this lovely little brush, an Inscribe Series 2000 size 00. This has been my primary figure-painting brush for well over 10 years, originally dealing with 40K Space Marines and Imperial Guards and Epic scale armoured vehicles and infantry. More recently it has been responsible for the majority of my 15mm figures. I've always found Inscribe brushes to be fantastic, easily the best of all the different types that I have tried over the years. This particular brush is only used for acrylics, which is probably why it has survived so long. The other brushes have been used for Humbrol enamels, and cleaning them in white spirit or turps really shortens their lifespan.

My latest find is cheap artists brushes from the local £1 shop. They come in a pack of 12; 4 decent quality gold taklon suitable for figures/vehicles, 4 coarse bristle suitable for large-scale scruffy scenery painting and 4 soft brushes (maybe squirrel or something?) which are ideal for undercoating or drybrushing when the bristles are cut to half length. Each type generally includes a couple of wide, flat brushes for covering large areas, plus a pair of smaller round brushes for detail.

Now all I have to do is get a move on and finish some of the many projects I have on the go - moon buggy, Eagle, dropship, armoured vehicles, SWAT team...

Moon Buggy

My new HEEV (Hostile Environment Exploration Vehicle) nears competion...


This started off as a Matchbox "Battering Ram" Police vehicle. It is supposedly 1:86 scale, but parts of it seem more like 1:200 judging by the size of hatches and windows! I could see that with a little modification to re-scale it to closer to 15mm, it would make a great exploration vehicle for travelling through moonscapes.

After drilling out the rivets and disassembling the parts, I discarded the battering ram into my bits box, along with the turret (not right for this, but could come in useful on another project if I replace the gun barrel...) Next, I attacked the out-of-scale upper cabin section with a pair of side cutters, removing all the window frames. A hacksaw was needed to cut through the solid rear section, and a large file smoothed all the cut areas flat. A new plasticard roof covered up this gaping hole, superglued in place. The cut-off top of the cabin featured a nice vent, so rather than throwing it away, I filed the underside flat and superglued it to the new plasticard roof. The remaining flat areas of plasticard were dressed with a plasticard hatch, vent and a couple of bits of guitar string to represent hinges and help hide joints.

A washer helped cover the hole where the turret used to fit, and a plasticard scrap glued underneath it blocked off the hole in the middle. Into this I added a couple of tiny watch parts, with a few more arranged around the turret mount to fill up some of the empty space. A couple of extra plasticard rectangles were added to the rear of the superstructure, one of which had a small piece of mesh glued on to make it look a little more interesting.

Although the rear of the vehicle featured a couple of small hatches, I decided that something larger was needed - after all, the occupants could be entering the vehicle wearing bulky EVA suits which certainly wouldn't squeeze through! I filed away the existing hatches and replaced them with a large plasticard hatch, suitably embellished with some old watch parts, guitar string hinges etc.

There was a large hole in the front of the vehicle which had housed the battering ram shaft. This was filled with epoxy putty and filed smooth when set. A small watch cog finished it nicely, perhaps some sort of equipment attachment point or power connection?

As it's supposed to be surveying airless worlds, I decided that jerrycans, wooden crates, bedding rolls and other stowage probably weren't appropriate on this occasion! The one thing I did add was a pair of ranging rods made from brass rod, the end of one being filed into a point.