IPMS/USA Reviews

This is one of three books in Pen & Swords Land Craft series. The other books include The Jeep and Bren Gun Carrier. The Land Craft books are good resources for modelers as they provide background on the design of vehicles, detailed descriptions, and description of variants. They also include a gallery of completed models and kits available.

M2/M3 Half-Track Book Contents

Introduction

Provides a brief description of the history of half-track vehicles subsequent to World War I, including early French vehicles and the half-track car T1. These early vehicles were tested for use as prime movers.

OKB Grigorov is a small model company based in Bulgaria that you may not be too familiar with. The company focuses primarily on AFVs, tanks, and naval ships in 1/72, 1/350 and 1/700 scales and they have an extensive list of products available. They produce full resin kits with photo-etch enhancements, as well as resin, photo-etch and white metal conversion pieces for other models. More recently, they began producing some plastic AFV kits.

When I was asked to review this kit, I have to admit to feeling a bit daunted. I have only done a handful of modern armor pieces, and even those were really restricted to IDF tanks and vehicles. There's not a whole lot of information out there on this specific vehicle either--a cursory Google search brings up primarily pictures of the actual animal known as the Clouded Leopard.

So to quote the introduction from the instruction sheet, after having used second-hand armored half-tracks and Vietnam War-weary V-150s, the Republic of China (ROC: Taiwan) engineers were urged by the US to receive training on designing their own wheeled IFVs. In 1992 as a result of this, the prototype six-wheeled CM31 was born. In the course of this, however, it was soon realized that eight-wheeled IFVs were the new norm. So using the CM31 as a base, development of a more versatile eight-wheeled IFV began in 2001. In 2005, the new design- the CM32, was finalized and given the name "Clouded Leopard". Production began in 2007 and featured an automatic 40mm grenade launcher and coaxial 7.62mm machine gun. Various versions have been created and production of the CM32/33 totaled 368 units.

From my new, best friends at Wikipedia: The M728 is a full-tracked combat engineer vehicle designed to provide maximum ballistic protection for the crew and is a heavily armed derivative of the M60 series tank. Modified to provide a mobile and maneuverable weapon for combat support of ground troops and vehicles, the M728 vehicle is used for breaching, obstacle removal, transportation of demolition teams, and pioneering operations.

OKB Grigorov is a small model company based in Bulgaria that you may not be too familiar with. The company focuses primarily on AFVs, tanks, and naval ships in 1/72, 1/350 and 1/700 scales, and they have an extensive list of products available. They produce full resin kits with photoetch enhancements, as well as resin, photoetch and white metal conversion pieces for other models. More recently, they began producing some plastic AFV kits.