Well... the postman brought me something nice in the mail this week- Jordi Rubio's 1/35 Rolls-Royce armoured car.

Since it arrived I feel like I have un-aged forty something years since I started fondling the resin. Seven is a good age to be when you have a brand new toy, but I promised mummy I would be good and finish the models I am working on before I started building this one.

I thought there might be a few people interested in first impressions, as the build will be the thick end of a month away.

The first impression is there is a lot of beautiful resin; There's no etched brass here but some truly delightful castings of some really tiny details - both pattern maker and resin pourer have produced an excellent set of parts. The packer on the other hand didn't do quite such a good job - there were just too many detail parts packed into one Ziploc bag for them to travel from Barcelona to San Diego County completely unscathed despite a really stout cardboard box - nothing serious but a few bits had torn from the pouring stubs and a few were a bit distorted. A couple more bags for the parts would make all the difference in shipping.

The big bits - hull, tray, chassis and turret - are delightful in their detail - lovely crisp rivets and bolt heads, and super thin castings where it matters. I was a little bit disconcerted to find that while the hull was hollowed out and could be fitted out if I felt so inclined, the turret is unfortunately a reversion to the hockey puck school of casting - it's solid with just a recess below the hatch if you want to put the top half of a man in it. The turret seems just a little tall for a 1920 pattern car, but there also seems to be excess material below the bottom line of rivets - reducing the height won't present too much risk to the surface detail but it will need a lot of elbow grease, patience and a big file.

There are no interior details; opening it up without damage to the exterior could be a real challege so I don't think I'm missing anything by not having them

The instructions are on an A3 colour sheet of photos of the parts and of the assembly sequence with all the parts numbered in the overview and in the individual steps - it should be pretty hard to muck this one up which isn't the universal standard for a limited run resin kit or even some plastic. There are no decals or painting instruction, though a comprehensive set of either would probably have cost more than the kit to produce considering the number of possibilities over a 20 something year service history.

This one is going to be a fun build - the parts breakdown looks to be well thought through and a couple of dry runs suggest that the out of the box build should be straightforward.

It's that "out of the box" business that causes the last concern; Jordi sells it as Rolls Royce/Fordson and that's just what it is -it's not exactly a Rolls and not quite a Fordson.

As an earlier ML post mentioned the rear springs on the kit are semi elliptical units with helper springs typical of the Fordson chassis, where as I believe the military version of the Silver Ghost chassis had long quarter elliptic springs like the car which extended forward of the rear axle to under the crew compartment; however the lovely resin wheels supplied are simple disc wheels as used on the Rolls - Fordsons had a five-spoked deign typical of many commercial trucks of the period. I can't comment on the rest of the running gear, but the rear axle possibly owes more to the Henry from England than to Henry of Detroit-cum- Dagenham

So… it's not quite a Rolls and not quite a Ford and not quite the definitive kit I still hope for, but it's a very very good effort - a Rolls looks like the easier bet with the parts given but if you can solve the wheel problem then a Fordson is perfectly possible...oh, and you may need to build a 1/35th Scarff ring for the turret.