Now, a friend of mine very kindly let me have a kit he had built of a CVRT Spartan.
It’s from a company I had not heard of before until I saw a build of one in the forum’s in the beginning of the year, Cromwell.
It’s a resin kit and I have to say, the kit and how it looks with detailing and the key areas is fantastic.
I was going to repaint NATO black and green, but I thought about it and am now thinking of a new approach…
I’m thinking of repainting below where the hull sponson plate would be in BATUS sand and green in slightly different tones to the Stillbrew, and from the hull sponson line upwards painting it red to turn it into a BATUS range safety redtop vehicle.
Now I am not 100% sure they had redtop Spartans, (I think I may have seen one but can’t be certain), I know they had safety warriors painted Red , ferrets, and land rovers with red canvas or the rear of the hard top body painted red…but I thought it might look good on a little simple Dio base with just the BATUS plain grass with it sat next to my Mk10…
Cromwell was a cottage manufacturer business run by Gordon Brown out of Glasgow. Had lots of issues almost a decade ago and customer service was abysmal. Many modelling sites have threads about the issues. There was a post on the old Armorama site about how he said was going to turn it around, but it never happened.
I heard he got sick and stopped the business, but that may just be rumour, as illness in the family was a common reason he gave for not responding to emails re people not receiving what they paid for. Most likely his lack of aftercare killed off his customer base.
Nice job on the white lines. They are the reason why I didn’t want to paint the BATUS scheme to my Chieftain mk11.
The Spartan looks great too. Enjoy refurbishing it.
That Spartan is a nice acquisition John. Cromwell models are extremely fine kits if you can get your hands on them. I have 4 in the stash. Enjoy having the pain of resin building done for you. Have fun with the kit and paint it up any way you like!
From my time in BATUS I remember the nets being like a vey fine nylon hessian type material attached to the usual nylon string backing net. You needed two for the tank, typically one would be rolled up and stuffed around the front of the glacis and the other rolled and laid across the NBC pack and around the sides of the baskets and secured with D10. That may have changed in the following years as my last time in Canada was in "92. You can see the front one in the pic below.
Still see people getting Cromwell Models kits in the Modern British Armour SIG on Facebook but it’s only braille scale and the recipients are all in UK from what I know.
I only actually remember using cam nets out there if we broke down…and even then it just looks daft… It’s like big massive tank hiding under a not very effective net in the middle of the plain lol…
That hard target link didn’t show me anything Max ?? Just niff naff and trivia posts …
Hi Johnny,
really nice idea with that BATUS Spartan! Well, what is said here of Cromwell models, is all absolutely correct. They do have the worst reputation of all resin manufactorers in Europe.
That kit came out well before Accurate Armour did theirs, it is probably around 40 years old. In that periode of time, Gordon did a good service at all and it really was possible to order from him without problems. He also had british braille scale armour in resin, of which I kept some vehicles of in my stash.
He earled his bad reputation in the later 90s… a really pity since he had nice 1/35 kits out.
.
