9K31 Strela-1 (SA-9 Gaskin)

I always wanted to have a SA-9 Gaskin or two - principally an ACE Models one if possible.  But alas, to-date, that seems likely to never happen.  I did however snag an ACE SA-13 Gopher (which for some reason it doesn't appear that I've ever taken a photo of it and posted it here).  At one point I decided to use a spare Britannia BRDM-2 hull and marry it with the Gopher SAM launcher turret,  You can see the entried about that here and here.

I was never completely satisfied with that - mainly because you could only have one or the other.

So a while back a friend of mine was putting in an order with Butler's Printed Models and asked if I wanted anything.  I'm not a dive in feet first kind of person, so decided to order 3 turrets - which handily enough BPM allow you to order separately.  I got an SA-9 SAM turret and two M901 ITV TOW Hammerhead  turrets.  I'll deal with the later in another post, but once arrived I cleaned up the turret quite quickly and tried it out on the BRDM-2 hull.  I was very satisfied with the result.

I then painted it very quickly and took just 1 photo for some reason.  Here's the completed model:

Very happy with the purchase.  It looks like BPM does some great prints and others that are not so great based on what my mate ended up buying.  Glad I put my toe in the water, but also glad I didn't spend up big.

Thanks

Richard

Soviet Trucks

It's been a while since I posted some newly completed stuff so today I'd thought I'd post up some Soviet trucks I either built & painted, repainted, or simply fixed up a bit.

I mentioned I recently had an article published in Wargames Soldiers & Strategy Issue 106.  I needed to take some photos for the article so I decided to add a few new vehicles and tried to make a couple of old vehicles look a bit more realistic.

Just over 3 years ago (hard to believe) I bought this Fabbri MAZ 535-A Artillery Truck:

Obviously I didn't want something that wouldn't have looked out of place in a May Day Parade for my photo which was supposed to be in the middle of a war in Norway.  So I repainted it.

That looks a bit better to me

I also had a what I think was a Trumpeter Jiafeng CA-30 fuel tanker which was part of a large swap I did years ago.  It had no instructions - but fortunately also came with Soviet markings.  Well it is an exact copy of a Zil-157 fuel truck.  So I built and painted it to provide fuel for the generators of my SAM Battery.

Sadly the decals were 20+ years old I reckon so they fell apart as I applied them.  All I was able to salvage is what you can see and there is a bit of silvering.

Finally I had ICM Ural Command Vehicle that I built here 10 years ago (geez) and it was very clean so I tried to weather it a little with a couple of new techniques (new to me anyway).  Here's how it came out:

So all in all I'm pretty happy with that lot.

Thanks

Richard