All the twos - Zvezda's SdKfz222 armoured car in 15mm

I have a new painting commission - 15mm WW2 Nationalist Chinese. I'm really looking forward to it too, as it is such a strange mix of vehicles and troop types.

One of the first up is a SdKfz 222 armoured car. I knew Zvezda did one in their "Art of Tactic" range and I thought this was a good opportunity to have a look at the kit. I did this with a bit of trepidation - while Art of Tactic models are usually described as quick builds, they sometimes are rather complicated, for example the Katyusha kit requires some fairly nimble fingers, and I had also read a few comments on TMP that suggested it was a bit of a challenging kit.

The kit is as usual for AoT reasonably priced at £3 or there abouts. It comes in 18 parts - which is quite high for AoT.

Suitably forewarned and with my trusty bottle of Liquid Poly AND a glass of whisky & ginger at the ready, I got stuck in, and..................

I think the guys on TMP must have been having a bad day. The kit went together quickly and easily, with no problems. I didn't particularly rush it but the whole thing took maybe 15-20 minutes and I was watching an episode of Grimm at the same time. All the parts were clean, well detailed and came off the sprue easily. I was very careful when removing stuff from the sprue not to damage any of the sharp edges and to clean the areas where they had connected to the sprue, but other than that it went together with remarkable ease. There was one tense moment right at the end when I was trying to get the hull top plate to seat properly with the sides, but when I lined it up right it clicked into place and stayed there, and almost no visible gap between the hull top and sides.

Overall detail is excellent, The only issue is the usual one with AoT kits - you cant model the turret hatch open, so no commander. In fact I would say this is the best 15mm version of the 222 I have seen, better even that the 1:72 scale ones available. I'm certainly going to pick up a couple for my 15mm Blitzkrieg era Germans. They say a picture paints a thousand words, so here's a close up which to me says only one - "beautiful"