BAM! Firefly at the ready!

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Ain’t she a beaut. 🙂

Tamiya kit, die cast hull.. Bloody heavy, even though you can’t see it. The tank is crisp and well executed, but it’s clearly not meant to be a gaming piece. There are small grab handles and parts that are going to be easily damaged and broken. I’d recommend leaving them off… Otherwise, you’d need tweezers.

OTOH, it’s clearly designed for modelers. The bogies, for example, aren’t glued together. One side is glued to the hull, the rest are just held in place by peg friction. This allows the wheels to be painted later, excellent thinking by Tamiya. Tracks are also separated for easy painting. Outer gun mantle and inner gun mantle are separate pieces for ease of painting too.

The tank commander is from a separate kit and does not come with the tank. It is a bit soft in the details though.. Had to stick a platform inside the turret to give him a place to stand on.

So now the basic work for my 1000 points Normandy Brits is done. Onwards to painting!

More Bolt Action Miniatures

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Mix of Tamiya and Warlord BAM minis.

Good grief, the rate of progress is really slow.. By now I have 8 minis done (2 more riflemen done), and is steadily eating through the BAM sprue. Not 100% happy with the BAM setup because the sprue comes with weapon-specific arms, but the parts are not labelled and you constantly have to refer back to the explanation sheet.

In addition, the BAM torsos aren’t actually set up to do multi-pose very well, some torsos have large flat sides still exposed after gluing the arms and torsos don’t often offer good cross torso fits. Not terrible, but the GW Gen 2/ Gen 3 style plastic rears its ugly limitations.

Still, not terrible. Because Normandy era PBIs are often photographed with their small packs and ET while advancing/ attacking, my parts count essentially increased by 2 for BAM and 3 or more for the Tamiya. Nuisance, that.

Still need to figure out basing. Warlord goes with a flat 25mm base, but I’ve grown used to 28mm minis on a raised base. Sigh.