I was looking at ACE models web site and they look like they have some interesting russian army kits in 1/72 and some French Armored Cars and Canadian APCs (Grizzly, Cougars and Huskies) coming out soon. I was wondering how are these kits?
Here is a link to their web site in case you are wondering:
http://www.acemodel.com.ua/?p=news&l=en
Thanks in advance.
Let me fill you in a bit. I hjave built about 12 ACE kits, and have two more ‘in qeue’ waiting to be built. They are limited run kits, and as such, they have alot of flash and require extensive cleanup of parts on the spue. Cleaning the tracks on these babies can be especially nerve-wracking, particularly on the BMP and MTLB kits. The instruction sheets are pretty good, but can be pretty vague sometimes with the placement of small parts. One downside to the instruction sheets is that they only show the one side of the model on the painting and decal placement steps. On the plus side (or minus side depending on your feelings about P/E) some of their kits incude Photo Etched parts to enhance the model even more. The one BRDM kit and BTR kit I got included vynil tires, a first for me. Also so far, every one of their BMP kits have a substantial gap in the front of the vehicle that require you to either cut the bracing behind the slope of the lower hull and bend it in, or apply extensive amounts of gap filling CA glue and sand down.
With that being said, these kits do build into some nice looking models of modern Soviet/Russian equipment that are probably more accurate in size and shape than anything else I’ve seen. They are also the first model companies to put out accurate kits of modern Soviet/Russian military equipment in 1/72 scale.
Here are some of my completed examples:
German BMP 1 ‘Ost’:

Iraqi T-55 Enigma

Sa 13 Mobile SAM system:

T-72 Tank:

BRDM 2 Scout vehicle:

BMP 2D Command Vehicle:

As you can see, they do build into quite nice little kits. However, I only reccomend them to an experienced small scale armor builder with patience. (Patience? What’s That?) They can be difficult for someone not as experienced and could turn that person off to building small scale armor.
I hope this helps somewhat in making your decision. If you want pics of examples of some of the kits’ issues, E-mail me and I can send them to you so you know what you’re getting into.