Panhard 178

 I was doing a bit of accounting of the vehicles I'll need to do all the 1940 France scenarios in the 'Birth of the Blitzkrieg' scenario book. Although I've got a fair bit covered, I can't really get away without at least one armoured car, the iconic Panhard 178. As most of my French stuff is QRF already, I ordered one of theirs.

What a lovely little vehicle it is. Along with fighting for the French, it can of course be pressed into service with the Germans, who rather liked the Panhard. 

This mould is obviously a bit long in the tooth as there were a few blobby bits but it is basically fine. The wheels are cast separately, but went on OK, helped with some Blu Tak to hold them in place. The main problem was that the gun barrel hadn't cast cleanly and promptly fell off, so I had to drill out the mount and replace it with 0.5mm brass rod. The replacement gun looks OK, but is missing the distinctive cone shaped muzzle brake. It will be much more sturdy than the original anyway.

The vehicle has some nice sharp lines which are crying out for a drybrush. The engine grills didn't take the ink wash as well as I'd hoped, so I may go over them again with a liner pen, if I can be bothered.

It 'sits' well however, and looks very business like. I did it in sand/green/red brown camo so it is good for both French and later German service, and didn't bother with any markings. It got an ink wash to run into the crevices, and a light drybrush of Iraqi Sand to dirty it up and bring up the highlights. I didn't bother with mud as it is quite colourful already.

I don't like to moan, but I had a bit of a problem with this order. I ordered a fair bit of French stuff at the same time and this is the only piece which actually turned up as ordered. Some of it was missing completely, and three of the tanks were the wrong models bagged up incorrectly in the codes I'd ordered. Chas has sold the QRF moulds on to another caster, and I can forgive some teething problems with a new business, but despite repeated emails I didn't hear anything back. In the end I returned the faulty castings and asked for a refund on the missing and incorrect items.

That is a shame as I've bought a lot of QRF stuff over the years, but now the 15mm is saturated with suppliers, so I'll just buy the stuff from someone more reliable instead. It will be a useful experiment with Butlers Printed Models to see if they can manage to print a decent Somua as I imagine the complex Hull and turret will be a bit of a challenge.