Zvezda BA-10 (15mm)

[Fitz]

This is Zvezda's 1:100 scale (15mm) WWII Soviet BA-10 armoured car.

It's the trickiest of these Zvezda kits I've encountered so far. Not a difficult build, but there are a few things to watch out for:

• The hull pieces interlock, and it took a bit of judicious bending and stretching to get them all seated properly against each other. Once in place, the fit is good and snug.
• The headlamps are very small and delicate, and there was no hope of getting their struts into the holes provided for them. I chose to trim them down and just glue them in place, though I could have enlarged the holes (but I couldn't immediately lay my hands on my pin vice to drill them). Both of them shot out of the tweezers, one of them never to be found again.
• The wheels are not interchangeable, and you do have to take care to get the right group off the sprue at the right time. And now, looking at the picture, I see I put the front wheels on inside-out. Too late to fix that now.
  
• The turret is very stiff on the pin provided. I got rid of the pin and magnetized it, so now it turns quite freely.

It builds up into a nice little kit, and now my Soviets have some scouting capability.

As an aside: Vallejo have changed their Yellow Green recipe since the last time I bought a bottle. It's now very much brighter than it used to be. The washes and weathering toned it down a bit, but it gave me a bit of a shock when it first went on.

[Rob_bresnen]

that looks the business. I thought it was 28mm at first. 

[von Lucky]

Agree - still looks pretty good. And I'm glad you provide the insights that you do (I also wasn't happy with the turret pins on my Azezda KV-1s).

[Fitz]

BA-10 #2 is done; it went together a lot more smoothly than #1 since I knew more what to expect — I managed to get the front wheels on the right way round, for a start, and both headlamps.



I've painted on some basic markings, mainly so I can tell the two apart on the wargames table, but also because I prefer them a little less plain. No.3 is the first one I did, No.4 is the second.

[Ultravanillasmurf]

Very nice.