Saturday 14 May 2016

Review: First To Fight Polish Wz.34 Armoured Car

One of the few 20mm purchases I managed to get hold of at Salute was the Wz.34 Armoured car for my 1939 Polish Force. I decided to review it as it is from what I think is a fairly new company called First to Fight.

First to Fight are a Polish company and they seem to be concentrating on the 1939 Polish invasion in 20mm scale at the moment. A bit of research on the web shows they do both German and Polish kits, across infantry, vehicles and guns.

Now this pack was a single vehicle, in 1/72 of the WZ.34 armoured car. It came with two options to have a machince gun or a 47mm gun. I wanted it for the bigger gun.

First impressions were good. The box comes cellophaned together with a small A4 magazine. Sadly, this was all in Polish, so what looked like lots of text and background info was lost to me. The only real translation was the painting guide, where the Vallejo paints were named with their English names, so easy to follow:




Having finished looking at the pretty pictures in the magazine and lamented my lack of Polish, I cracked open the box. The kit was split over two sprues, and the instructions were fairly clear on the back of the box - there was no seperate leaflet on how to build it:





I found that the kit went together fairly quickly. It is somewhere between a gaming kit and a model kit it terms of detail. It has some things you don't need on a gaming model - such as suspension modelled underneath etc but goes together easily enough so that you aren't wasting a lot of time building something you want to use.

Once it was done, I was surprised at how tiny it was! Here is a shot next to some 20mm infantry and it's a tiny little vehicle. Still, it was only a two person armoured car, and a lot of ealy war stuff for all nations was tiny compared to what came later, so I won't labour on the scale issue. It will do for my purposes.




Overall, I think this kit is half decent. At £7.50 for a single vehicle it was perhaps a little more expensive than I would like. However, this is balanced with the fact that the company seem to be covering a lot of stuff you can't find elsehwere. There also is never going to be as much competition in this period as say 1944, so perhaps that's a factor. I also found the model a llittle bit flimsy in places, mainly where the wheels attached. I snapped two off during assembly, and whilst this is not a problem as it's a simple fix, it's a tad irrating and something I'll have to try to remember when moving the model around on the table top.

I would certainly consider getting other kits from First to Fight, but I suspect it may be the more obsucre vehicles. The TKS Tankette's for example I shall be looking around for, as at £7.50 each from these guys, and the fact I want four or five, make's those a tad expensive. But it's a company worth looking out for.

The model should be quick and easy to paint - I suspect it's too small to warrant even breaking out the airbrush, but that will be another blog post. 


2 comments:

  1. The problem of the price is that the UK sellers selling it at a very expensive prices. For the future try the Polish store directly, that's how I used to do it. The price for the model move down to Ł4.00. They have paypal payments too.
    What about the magazine, it have very good historical background for Polish Campaign and it is never to late to start learning Polish ;)
    Good luck with your Polish collection.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the tip, I shall certainly keep it in mind as I have a lot more Poles to do. As for learning polish, it would be very useful, even at work, but I have neither the time nor money to do so!

      Delete