I wanted to get good track sag for my 1/72 scale Panzer V Panthers (kit# 03107 by Revell), as evidenced in some of the photos over at “Juggernauts of the Second World War”. The Revell kit I’m using has length-and-link tracks, and very nice they are too. To get good track sag, I knew I’d have to coat the top length piece of tracks liberally with glue in order to heat it and slightly melt it into shape. This meant using a powerful superglue.

I had been using Flash Cyanoacrylate (thick mixture) but it was too thick…almost like putty…and that was going to be completely inappropriate for what I wanted. I didn’t want dried lumpy bits everywhere or ‘blocky’ or ‘clogged up’ tracks. I needed a extremely fast curing superglue that was less viscous.

I was advised to try Zap’s Zap-a-gap, medium. It’s not too watery – I was advised that the ‘thin’ that they make can, in the hands of someone unused to it (ie. me!), easily run and ruin work.

It did the job perfectly, good track sag was obtained on my models to match the photo evidence I had of actual track sag on these vehicles: (yes, that’s three kits on top of each other). A nice gentle curve above and then resting on the tops of the roadwheels.

As well as Zap-a-gap, another essential tool was required – some things to hold/wedge the tracks in place while the glue cured. Here’s a photo of what I used: – pieces of bamboo skewers that you buy to make satay skewers/shashliks and pieces of wooden disposable chopsticks/kwaizu/hashii, all cut into 3/4 inch lengths. Wedged in between the track and the body, it held the tracks in contact with the roadwheels at the right place and with the curing effects of Zap-a-gap (the slight melting that allows some re-shaping) I got perfect track sag.

***

The small river/stream will have to wait a few days or weekends, sorry all. I’ve got too much on the work table again – all these Panthers, that last Horch AA car and four PaK 40 crews that have been sitting round waiting for paint and basing.

My apologies to Eily Beadell and Nell Tollerton!

I started by making a stream/small river, about 45m wide in scale (including banks). A bigger river will be a later project, maybe next summer.

For today, I first took stock of what sheet styrene I had left, which was just going to be enough: . You can see the trusty Olfa cutter there – one of the greatest wargaming terrain/wargaming scenery-making tools you can own.

Next, I had to make two sets of measurements. First, I had to make sure that the lengths I was cutting would fit comfortably in their intended receptacle and then second I had to make sure the river was the right width. These were done by 1) measuring cut lengths against the box that will hold them and 2) using a based infantry team for width. An infantry team is on a 40mm base, which is 40m on the wargaming table. If they cross at a ford, where they can Walk (not Wade), they should be able to get over in one turn. Both of those measurements are being made here: . Ah yes, the A3 Reflex copy paper box. I’d be very inconvenienced without them! They hold my hills, my trees, my buildings, my roads and very soon, my rivers.

Where possible, I used offcuts and previously-cut pieces as templates or “cookie-cutters” to speed up cutting: In that photo, I’m about to use an off-cut from the perfect straight edge to do the cutting for the other bank of the river piece, which is then snapped off as a complete piece. Then that completed whole piece can be laid on the sheet styrene, cut around and snapped off as a second seperate but complete piece! Etc., etc.

As well as straight pieces of different lengths, I made a narrow man-made ford section, a natural ford section, a Y-intersection, curving sections and ‘wobbly’ sections as well as a section that opens into a small swamp or bog before becoming a stream/river again: . Those two at the bottom – the left is meant to be a separate swamp or bog, the right will become a large pond or small/medium lake.

Last, check once again they fit in your receptacle: .

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll get another tube of caulk.

Battlefield Accessories is a local wargames terrain/wargames scenery manufacturer producing mostly for the 1/72 & 1/76 scales.

Having already made up ‘BA14 Ruined Building Pack Size 3′ last year, I picked up ‘BA16 Ruined Building: Spare Wall Pack’ this year at our Open Day this year, for which the contents are 4 x4″ & 4 x 2.5″ Walls.

Since I still have so much 1mm sheet styrene lying around, it would supply the bases/floors for two of these buildings. I also decided one would be undamaged and one damaged.

The logs piled against the walls are real trigs that I found during walks around the neighbourhood, that are already dried out. Providing one uses a fine, sharp saw, they become very suitable 1/72 scale logs.

The moss effect almost entirely covering one wall on each building is ultrafine leftover flock that I originally purchased to represent duckweed on ponds. I’m now using it for modelling moss growing on walls.

The other green effect, looking like veins or cracks but fluffy is an attempt to model vines or creepers growing up and spreading their branches out along the wall. I’m fairly pleased with the final result.

The burnt effect is model railroad coal and some 50% Black Ink spattered beyond it to show where flame spread but didn’t consume the wood.

Now that these are finished, it really is time to get cracking with some Nikolas Lloyd caulk waterways!

In an earlier post about this kit, I discussed good and points about this kit after having weashed and primed it for assembly.

I then provided some more commentary about this kit after completion, in this post.

Now, having just today put the finishing touches on the second one I purchased, I’d like to discuss the biggest problem with this kit in more detail.

My major gripe about this kit concerns the assembly of the axles to both the car’s chassis and to it’s wheels. All four wheels have their own individual axles in this kit, each axle being about 1 cm long and individually connecting to the chassis.

The connection of each axle to both chassis and wheel requires expert modeller’s skills, kitbashing or clamps & spirit levels to ensure the axles are at exact right angles and levels.
Why do I state this? Well, in connecting each axle to the chassis, the axle simply rests flush against the chassis frame. It does not slide into a hole in the chassis or have some sort of a peg or key on the end of the axlet hat is held neatly in place by a shaped groove in the chassis. It just sits there, nothing to fix or hold it in place, so it can easily end up not staying at a rigght angle to the chassis.
To ensure it is correctly glued at right angles, you need to use clamps and a ‘modellers mate’ or ‘modeller’s hands’ or some other set of devices to keep everything held in place. If there were just two long axles, one for the front wheels and one for the back wheels, all this fuss could be avoided. When I come to assemble the 4 Horch 108 passenger cars (to carry a platoon of Panzergrenadiers) that are sitting in the to-do pile, I’m going to use two pieces of brass rod as axles, and use very fine drillbits to ensure all sits snugly and well to the chassis.
To be fair, there is a sort of frame that you are meant to glue on over the the axles once youve got them in place, but my experience in assembling the first Horch AA car showed that the axles can still end up at not on right angles/horizontal due to gravity pulling them… this results in wheels that don’t rest properly on the surface under them – one or more will be off the ground or too far below the other three, requiring the offending whee/sl to filed down so all 4 wheels are touching the ground, with a plastic axle breaking in the process (yes, that has happened with both vehickes, requiring extra drilling, more painstaking re-glueing with modeller’s mates keeping everything at right angles and the kits held up for 24 hours while waiting to ensure that the glue bond had completed cured).

I’ve discussed the connection (via good glueing) of the axles to the chassis – now to discuss the connection of the axle to the respective wheel.
As with connecting to the chassis, there is no peg-and-hole arrangement, or key-and-groove arrangement…just a slight depression in the flat surface of the inner hubcap where the end of the axle is meant to rest and be glued. Again, you need to have all the right tools, equipment or whatever you use to make sure the wheels end up at perfect right angles to the axle and the well the wheel sits in. Otherwise, all four wheels won’t rest properly on the ground, you’ll have to try filing them, leading to something bending or breaking, etc, etc.
I used a fairly fine drillbit and drilled into the hubcab, to create my own peg-and-hole arrangement with the axle sliding snugly and holding well in the hubcab.
However, I’m going to use two brass rod axles with holes drilled into the hubcabs with the Horch 108 passenger cars as I’m sure this will get a perfect result first time with a lot less fiddling and frustration.

The rest of assembling these cars is fairly pedestrian, until you come to the photoetched brass rear-view mirrors and the like. I glued them on to the first car but found they bent and broke too easily, so for wargaming I would advocate simply forgoing them or using sturdy plastic rearview mirrors and width indicators left over from other kits or kitbashed from leftover sprue. Display modellers – I jnow you’ll ignore this.

I commenced work on those Revell Panthers a couple of weekends back because I’d finished those three Hasegawa 251/9 ‘Stummels’ – they had just been sitting around on my hobby table waiting for me to stop running around so busily and take a couple of piccies of them. The one time I was ready to photograph them, the weather wasn’t – heavy rain pounded down all morning. My photos are all taken using morning sunlight, but in the shade and without flash. That way, the lighting and colouring looks as natural as possible. With pounding rain, the possibility of photographing the 251/9s was thwarted.

These are similar to the 234/3 ‘Stummel’ that I did two months ago – the 75mm L24, its gun laying mechanism & gun bed are all identical. Assembling the kit was very straightfoward. I elected not to put any crew figures in – the Italeri chap I put in with the 251/22 was a bit too big for the vehicle (ie. his scale was not 1/72…possibly 1/70) and I didn’t want the same odd look with these…but since I have a surplus of crew figures from the Hasegawa 234/2 Puma kits, I might use one of those figures in the future, as they are to scale with their vehicle.

How many more to do? The Panzerfaust army list for Panzergrenadier companies gives me a pair of 251/9’s as a heavy weapons cannon section for s standard company.  A Panzergrenadier heavy weapons company has a cannon company, comprised of three sections with each section having two 251/9s.

I’ve done my standard heavy weapons cannon section (numbered 241 & 242) and one of the heavy weapons company vehicles (numbered 251). Here  are 241 & 242:

Now all three: 

and here’s a view from above: .

If I was to go completely silly, I have five more to go. Only if I can get them on a big discount or at a swap & sell…

Now, some extra resources I found online for this project were:

1. colour and b&w photos by The 9th Reenactment Society of their own ‘Stummel’,
2. a walkaround with colour photographs of the 251/9 museum piece from the Deutsches Panzermuseum in  Munster on a site called “The Panzer Tank Walkaround or Panzer Photo Gallery” (there are other Panzers there to look at, too!); and lastly
3. the same as #2. immediately above but taken by a different photographer. Also with more photos.

I really like the green cammo scheme on the Munster 251/9…I might try to use it on the Panthers when they are ready.

***

Through the superior firepower (well, superior CNC & milling tools of a colleague) I have been able to get an identical replacement part for the MAC Distribution Horch 108 (Kfz. 70) & 20mm Flak 30 that I shelved back in the first half of the year due to losing a critical piece of the gun bed. I have nearly finished assembly and will do a similar camouflage scheme but with Dark Angels Green instead of Goblin Green.

I figured with all these fumes from assembling 7 Panthers, what harm was one more kit going to do?

It’s not been easy to assemble, either (just like the first time). I’m not looking forward to working on the four MAC Horch 108 passenger cars I’ve got!

I’ve begun assembly of 7 Panzerkampfwagen V “Panther” (Sd.Kfz. 171), known by their nickname of Panthers. These are the Revell kits, #03107 however most were bought as the combi-sets with accompanying figures (those of Fallschirmjäger). I’m only in the early stages, glueing road wheels onto the chassis and partially assembling the turrets.

My main tank kit assembly order nowadays is as follows:

1. Lower chassis
2. Wheels onto lower chassis
3. tracks
4. Paint lower chassis and tracks
5. Join lower and upper chassis
6. Turret
7. Remaining mandatory chassis details as well as any crew figures or wire aerials
8. Any kitbashed field modifications (me using bits of other kits to add on stowage etc.)
9. Painting

The detail on this kit is pretty good. I’m going to assemble them as A types and have selected an acknowledged and photographed Infantry Regiment Großdeutschland camouflage for them, of green mottling over Dark Yellow. To see the black and white photographic evidence (and then a colour illustration of how it would look), get a copy of Panzer Colors III: Markings of the German Army Panzer Forces 1939-45 by Bruce Culver (and look Ma, I’m using LibraryThing again!!!).

I’m assembling 7 so that I have a platoon on 5 plus an HQ of 2. Panzerfaust: Armored Fist is written with German ad-hoc companies in mind…my recommendation is to always buy a platoon of a major vehicle and then the requisite number of HQ vehicles of the same type, in case you want them to be the HQ too.

ESCI’s 1/72 Wespe kit. An original, not the recent Italeri re-release. Purchased at a Swap & Sell.

While some lucky AFVs received very solid, evenly applied Winter camouflage coats using air-compressed sprayguns (spraygun seen in use here) many had thinned out or poorly-mixed whitewash applied in varying fashiuons – often using ordinary brushes such as these gents do to their Tiger here, but using brooms and even dipping rags into the mixutre then smacking the rag against the vehicle was not unknown.

The whitewash often didn’t stay on for very long, either, leading to all sorts of streaking and fading. This is what I’ve tried to replicate in this kit.

Overall, this kit was pretty easy to assemble. The rack on the left side for holding jerrycans was not standard-issue, however…therefore if I do up a platoon, most won’t have that rack and they certainly won’t have the spare box that I added on the right.

A medium-sized township somewhere on the Eastern Front…the Eastern Front in Spring 1945, that is. Two reconnaissance forces clash somewhere in or near Germany.

There was a moderate south-easterly wind blowing.

We decided to play lengthways for this game, as our AFVs could all move at very good speeds and Peter wanted me to see just how that translated onto the table.

I had a company comprised of many different AFVs – 234/2 Pumas, a 234/3 Stummel, 222s and Lynxs. Peter’s Soviet force had a high percentage of Lend-Lease vehicles – M3A1s, M3 half-tracks as well as T-70s.

FIRST TURN:

Both sides moved. My 234/2 Pumas moved at 1/2 their maximum permitted speed, so they could shoot at the T-70s they saw on the main road on the other side of town.

The Pumas hit, but at that range their shells could never penetrate, so the shells bounced off.

SECOND TURN:

More movement. The T-70’s guns can’t reach my Pumas, so my Pumas take advantage of the situation, opening fire and causing one T-70 to be Tracked.

THIRD TURN:

Now AFVs from both sides were racing across the table top.

Peter was right – these recon AFVs really could fly, and having the roads helped this aspect of the game too.

The T-70s are now in range and fire a salvo at the opposing 234/2s but with no success. The 234/2s return fire, getting a Stun result on one of T-70s and  immobilising the other.

FOURTH TURN:

With AFVs sited by both forces, I needed all my 6 ‘pips’ to split my forces up. All jockeyed for cover or to present their heavily-armoured fronts to their opponents.

Down in the south-east of the town, my Lynxs came under solid fire from the Lend-Lease M3A1s, causing one Lynx crew to panic and bail out.

To the north, the 234/2 Pumas both immobilise the already immobilised T-70 and destroy its gun too – Peter rules that it is effectively destroyed as it can do nothing else.

FIFTH TURN:

I order all my German forces to slow right down. Firing at half speed affects their aim (not surprisingly) so now they are to only move 5cm each or less. My rolling for shooting goes downhill though – I roll far too high all of a sudden so my strategy is for naught.

The Russian infantry whom had been tank-riding and dismounted back in Turn Two, hurl Molotov cocktails from their concealed positions in the railway station at the Pumas. Peter rolls the top result possible – Puma #2 is destroyed!

I make a Morale Check for the whole Company…a Shaken result. Not so good.

SIXTH TURN:

My toughest platoon on the table – my 234/2 Pumas – must Withdraw. ‘Withdraw’ means reverse 5cm but can still Shoot…I just cannot go forward under any circumstances.

This turn there was much death. Peter’s  BA-10 platoon are all effectively Tracked and so they Bail Out. My Puma platoon leader is killed. 

I roll an 8 for my Morale Check. With adjustments, the final result is 0 – my remaining Puma must Retreat – but since enemy forces are so close, it’s forced to Surrender to those nearby enemy forces.

At this stage, I declared the Germans had lost. The Russians were bloodied – the most bloodied this year – but I didn’t have enough remaining firepower to break them.

An interesting game – assembling, painting and getting a whole 6 vehicle 234/2 Puma platoon reay for a re-match is an appealing way to spend the upcoming Christmas break.

I’ve been alerted to a discussion over at the Axis History Forum web site, where the members are displaying  photos and providing some commentary about unusual WWII German AFV camouflage schemes. I hope it’s useful to some of you out there!

The Hasegawa Kettenkrad included in the “Schwimmwagen + Kettenkrad” 1/72 scale Minibox kit turns out pretty well, as you can see from the pictures above. You can also see three ESCI telegraph poles from their Diorama Accessories kit. Those telegraph poles are certainly better than the Fujimi ones! Much more detailed and realistic.

The Hasegawa Kettenkrad is only problematic when it comes to including the figures that are meant to be used with it. Two problems here: 1) You cannot get two blokes sitting on the back – realistically, they should be able to. I decided to go with just one passenger. Mine is packing an MG-34.    2) The fully assembled driver cannot be placed properly. I cut off much of his lower legs, trimmed & filed the stumps and his thighs and then he fitted on his seat and his posture looked mostly normal. Otherwise, it’s quick to assemble and looks pretty good.

You can read about what On the Way! has to say about Hasegawa here. In particular, Stephen Brezinski provides a comparison of Hasegawa’s Kettenkrad versus Academy’s Kettenkrad here.