Review: Battlefront 17/25 Pdr Pheasant (BR520)

17/25 Pdr firing in North Africa

This blister has been sitting in the lead mountain for an age. V4 and my desert Rats force was exactly the inspiration I needed to dig this out and put it together.

Blister contents

These are old metal models. I suspect they are at least 2 generations behind the current plastic version. The final generation before plastics typically included a command team. This blister didn’t. Given that I am going to be using these guns for a v4 army, this is far from a problem. Another good clue to the age of the models is that it includes an assembly guide.

Assembly:

I typically lay out all the parts from blisters before cleaning and assembling. The 17/25 pdr blister is packed full of pieces. There should be 34 in total made up of the limber, gun, crew and bases. Mine was sadly missing a few. I was missing the 2 wheels for one of the guns and one of the limbers was missing a set of doors, a wheel and a yoke. For the list I was working on (see my Cancon post here) I needed only 3 guns. I would only need one of these 2 metal guns to go with the pair of the new plastic ones I already had.

Whilst I worked on this one complete gun, I sent off an email to Battlefront Customer Service. I got a quick response and a package arrived a short time later. Thankfully, the introduction of plastics, at least for popular items, should greatly reduce the blisters in circulation and therefore the chance of blisters missing pieces.

I made the decision to just paint up 3 crew for each gun (there are 5 in the pack) and leave the limber off. Whilst the limber looks terrific and the extra crew would be nice, it was all a little busy. In addition, given the size of the gun barrel and the length of the gun carriage, I would need to place the gun right at the front of the base. This leads to issues with storage and transport. I.E bent barrel syndrome.

Included instructions

I went ahead and glued the gun, carriage and turntable together. If you have glued a metal Battlefront gun together before, you won’t have an issue with this one. The gun fits to the carriage and the shield is glued to the front. I then attached the wheels. These old metal kits are the basis of many of my armies but really are yesterday’s technology. The models need a little clean-up from the casting process and the fitting points for the gun shield, wheels and gun barrel all needed trimming, drilling out or filing. That said, we are talking minutes and not hours.

The crew are the typical high quality and dynamic casts we can expect from Battlefront metals. Yes, there are mould lines to clean up but they are otherwise well cast, have a real depth of detail and well represent their function. Each gun came with 5 different crew figures – all of them good.

I glued the crew to the base along with the gun ready for painting.

Painting:

Not much to say here. I followed the same process on the gun and crew that I did on some of my earlier units. You can find the method and colours I used on my earlier review here.

When I painted up my earlier models, I didn’t add any flock or tufts. At that time, I was still unpacking my modelling stuff and hadn’t yet found all my hobby boxes. Now that I have, I used some standard tufts in 3 different colours along with some straw/sand coloured flock. Contrary to popular opinion, there is vegetation in the desert and some of it is even green.

Summary:

These old blisters are still out there. There are still lots of them in lead mountains and retail outlets the world over. Yes, some popular models (UK 6 pdr, 25 pdr, USA 105mm, 37mm, German Pak 40 Pak 38 etc) are being replaced with plastic, but not every gun will be. They still serve a purpose, are well made and look good on the table.

In my instance, I managed to pick up a blister with some missing parts but BF customer service are terrific at organising replacements. What I did get was free of imperfections, goes together well and best of all, paints up well.