Part 2
Just looked at one of the images of the rear fender box, I have added a image of the lower half of the box only and not the top half attached to it. My mistake
Ammunition storage would have been important on the 222 and I have carefully considered my options and decided to overload her ready for battle. In Tunisia in 1943 she would have had lots of enemies to fight.
Lets start with the 20mm ammunition containers pictured below - these are for the 10 round magazine which was specifically designed for use in vehicles. 20 round magazines were available for AAA. These are Lionroar boxes
All can be opened and closed and locked with the little "0" shaped clasp. Many PE manufacturers make the 20mm ammunition containers, I will do a little review of the Griffon Model and Lionroar boxes later on in the update, but I am safe in saying that Lionroar is some of the finest PE that I have ever made and looks very acceptable.
Let's talk 20mm magazines, below are the magazines that I have assembled so far along with a spare 20mm round. I have some more Griffon Model magazines that arrived in the post today and I will do a full build of one in the next update and add them to the 222 when appropriate. All of the magazines that you see below are Lionroar but are nearly identical to the Griffon offerings which I added to my Panzer 2 just a few months ago. All are soldered.
One massive positive for the Griffon offerings is that they come with 20x20mm ammo rounds along with 10 spent cases. As I will illustrate this is of great importance.
Below are three images of different 10 round magazines but each is different -
When the magazines are fully assembled they are hollow inside and this is a mistake The magazine in the middle is unaltered. The real magazines would never have been hollow unless the follower spring had broken or the follower had fallen out making the magazine unserviceable and useless. This will have to change.
The magazine on the far right contains 2x20mm rounds soldered in place giving the apperance of a loaded magazine. The rounds would have been in a double stacked formation meaning that it would have been possible to see the second round.
If a magazine is empty the follower would have been visable as it would have been pushed up by the spring with only the feed lips stopping the thing from falling out. So you would have never seen a hollow magazine. The magazine on the left is my attempt at creating a follower out of lead; a process I have shown below using that spare 20mm round and some lead.
I have pressed the round into the lead making a mold of the casing and offered it up to a magazine
Trimmed the lead
and glued it into place
These are the fully loaded ammo containers
*******Griffon vs Lionroar
Below are two images of 2 20mm ammo containers, the one on the left being Griffon and the right Lionroar
The following is a brief review of both containers.
The Griffon Model container is inordinately more complex than the Lionroar equivalent. The problem with this is every time you try to solder brass that has already been soldered multiple times you risk catastrophic failure. The Griffon Model container took me about a day to complete while I made all four Lionroar containers in a roughly equivalent time. Nor is complexity necessarily making the Griffon containers better, the lid does not close properly and the "0" latch does not work. While the Griffon container is probably more historically accurate, I did feel like crushing it with a large rock at several points during its construction. Overall the Lionroar kit is superior.
The following image is from MissingLynx and shows a similar magazine and container set up. Please feel free to draw your own conclusions.
The next image is a bit random. It is of spent 20mm ammnition.
Let's talk about machine gun maintainence kits. This one is from Griffon Models L35A004 German ammo box kit which I had lying around and is superb.
The following are MG 34/42 ammunition cans for the 7.92mm round from the same Griffon kit, they would have contained 50 rounds each along with a gen2 Dragon ammo can for comparison.
Both containers are really nice. However the Dragon kit is a lot less versatile and not such good value for money. The rounds are slightly small, you have to glue the container in either the open or shut position and you have to buy the entire gen2 kit to get just one container as opposed to the 3 Griffon give you to make.
The following are a few rather random images of the build in its present state.
Front fender with flag thing.
The skeleton structure of the rear fenders.
And the last image is for just for scale.
Thanks for looking,
Steven
