After spending 3 months scratch-building my Brueckenleger IVc (posted here two weeks ago), I needed something easy to reset the creative juices. I chose the Eastern Express Finnish BT-42 SPG (SRP $19.95).
The first thing I realized was references for WWII Finnish armor are a bit “hit and miss”. There are a lot of modern museum photos of Finnish equipment, but most of it has post war modifications or has some…well…interesting paint schemes. I did locate one wartime photograph of the vehicle I built in a book, but it was only a partial, taken after the vehicle was knocked out in 1944. The only thing I could see clearly was the vehicle was painted in the Finnish mid-war tri-color camo (gray, dark sand, moss green) and had the “cropped” swastikas adopted by the Finns as their primary marking.
With this in mind, I built the kit pretty much OOTB with the only exceptions being the front fenders - which are okay for a BT-7, but need to be cut off for the BT-42 - and a couple MV lenses for the lights. The build took 12 days to complete of which only 4 days was construction and the remaining 8 days were painting and weathering. Painting was done with MM enamels and artist acylics while weathering was done primarily with pigments and pastels. I would highly recommend this kit to anyone wanting to build something “different” in a relatively short time.
Here are the pictures. As always, comments, suggestions, criticisms, and questions are highly encouraged…
Thanks for looking!