My recent order to Copplestone Castings included the first armoured vehicle for my Russian Civil War forces, a very nice resin and metal 1/56th scale model of an Armstrong-Whitworth Armoured Car. It’s a pretty typical design for a WW1/RCW Russian armoured car, with a pair of machine guns each in their own turret on a six-wheeled armoured body.

The resin and metal are all very cleanly cast, with practically no flash, no casting errors, and minimal seam lines on the metal parts. You get the resin body, two resin turrets, two metal machine gun barrels, a metal front axle, and six metal spoked wheels. The body is roughly 3.5″ long

After cleanup I drilled and pinned the gun barrels to the turrets, but haven’t bothered pinning the turrets to the body — I think there’s more than enough contact area, despite superglue’s notoriously poor shear strength.

Here’s the beast in bare metal, with a Brigade Games 28mm White Russian priest for scale, and below, as it currently sits on my workbench.

The paintjob so far (all paints Reaper Master Series acrylics) is a basecoat of 2:1 Swamp Green:Pure Black, then a GW Devlan Mud wash. The green is gradually highlighted up with straight Swamp Green, a 1:1 mix of Swamp Green:Military Green, then straight Military Green.

The skull on the armoured radiator cover is freehand from Leather White, with a bit of a highlight of Pure White.

The undercarriage got a basecoat of Blackened Steel, then a mix of browns (Earth Brown, Muddy Brown and a couple of others) to muddy it up. I used a cheap, stiff brush to stipple the browns up the body for the muddy effect.

The paint job so far on the Armstrong-Whitworth has to trace it’s inspiration to Sidney Roundwood’s spectacular article on painting British tanks for the Western Front. The plan from here is to get the wheels on and the base installed (a minimal “shadow” base from styrene card and Milliput) then break out the pastel chalk for another round of dust and dirt.