History

The name ‘clouded leopard’ is taken from a beautiful medium-sized wild cat that is found throughout much of Southeastern Asia and pictured below to satisfy your animal interest for this beautiful cat.

This kit is a Taiwan Infantry Fighting Vehicle (TIFV) and appears to closely resemble the Stryker vehicles I have seen at Ft. Lewis. That’s where the apparent similarity ends, as the basic CM-32 vehicle series is new design built in Taiwan, the Republic of China.

Italeri has released a brand new mold kit for “Italian Tanks” that can be used for wargaming or as a nice break from more complex builds.

In the cover of the box you have both a medium tank and a self-propelled artillery. Be aware that the parts in the kit only allows you to build one. Or if you are a bit creative, to have an interchangeable top and being able to display it as one or the other.

Being a brand new mold, the surface finish is excellent and there is no flash anywhere. Being oriented towards wargaming, some of the details might be simplified (like the whole running gear is a single piece) but that adds to the straight and easy assembly component of this kit.

ICM has certainly put its Ford Model T molds to good use, making no less than four different variants of this ubiquitous little vehicle previously, all variants which served with distinction in World War One. Now a fifth variant has been added – a little-known armored version used by the Royal Naval Air Service along the Russian Front. Really more of a weapons carrier than an armored car, only nine of these were ever made. I rather suspect that it was seriously underpowered for the additional weight of the armor, which would have made this a strictly hard-surface weapon of war.

Like the vehicle itself, the kit is a relatively simple build. It also comes with a separate sprue containing the parts for their newly released Vickers Machine Gun, which is a fine little kit in and of itself. There are three moderately-sized sprues with lots of parts you won’t need, a clear sprue for the lamps, a small decal sheet, and that’s about it for complexity.

Camera On 17 Sd. Kfz. 7 Mittlerer Zugkraftwagen 8T Vol. 2, is number 17 in the “Camera On” series published by MMPBooks/Stratus and is a follow up to volume 1. The author, Alan Ranger, has written several books in this series with subjects such as “German Horse Power”, “The Einheits-Diesel WW2 German Trucks to “No 22 Krupp Proze Lorry”.

This is a thin book but very large format, and the images are of a very high quality of the various 4 Wheeled German armoured cars of WWII.

The book covers the Kfz.13, Kfz. 14, Sd.Kfz. 221, 222, 223, 247, 260 and 261.

The most widely used 221, 223 and 223 take up most of the book. The photos and descriptions are great and very detailed.

I found this book fascinating and will be using some of the Photos as inspiration for a few kits in my stash. This this a fantastic reference for all armour modelers.

I highly recommend this book.

Thanks to MMP Books and Casemate Publishers for providing this book for review and to IPMS USA for allowing me to review it.