Battlefield Accessories’ BA16 Ruined Building: Spare Wall Pack

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!

Sd. Kfz. 251/9 ‘Stummel’ – Panzergrenadier heavy weapons support

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!

Heat, trucks, guns and scenery

Still 4 weeks of Spring left, but today is the second day of over 30 degrees…in fact, looking at the MelbinYewni real time temperature graph, today got to just over 34! This means it’s time to think about doing lots of wargames terrain / wargames scenery, as there will be the heat to cure and dry everything thoroughly and promptly.

I’ve made a start: the three telegraph posts from an old ESCI Diorama Accessories set have been assembled, based and given some lumpy earth around their bases…ready now for painting.

I finished off a platoon of PaK 36 anti-tank guns with crews, plus that ICM Krupp truck, so that they wouldn’t bother me and so that “Operation Barbarossa” next year will be a reality. The PaK 36s are from Fujimi, the crews are the one worthwhile figure from the Fujimi set the gun comes in, a chap from the  Revell  Fallschirmjägers and one of the two ESCI / Italeri Sd. Kfz. 251/1 crew. Photos: .

Some more comments about the ICM Krupp L2H143 Kfz 70 kit…it turns out pretty well and looks great painted. I opted to have the MG 34 on a pintle mount in the rear tray option, to fit in with the Kubelwagen Type 82 which also had pintle-mounted MG34. I don’t like the decals that ICM provided for this kit, though. There is too much excess clear decal surrounding the rear number plate, and even drybrushing with Kommando Khaki as a coat of dust didn’t help…in fact it made it worse and drew attention to the excess. There was also far too much excess on the front number plate – which is meant to wrap around a front bumper bar which is probably only a milimetre wide. Stupid! It wrapped but wouldn’t glue. I know some modellers add a special glue under any decal they apply, but I don’t have that glue and don’t think it should be necessary. The front number plate decal’s glue didn’t hold and so the whole thing popped off during drybrushing. A shame. Sorry ICM, sorry Roden, but I’m not having much luck with your decals.

Now, Fujimi’s product is meant to be 1/76 scale, but it isn’t. Let me clarify…the house probably is, but the figures and PaK gun supplied with it are definitely 1/72 scale or even larger…possibly even 1/70 scale! Anyway, only one figure from that product is worth using with the anti-tank gun because the others are even worsely sculpted and moulded than the figures Hasegawa provide with their WWII AFVs. Hence why each PaK 36 base I’ve done has figures from other manufacturers to make up the two-man crews that Panzerfaust: Armored Fist requires.

Lastly – a couple of Battlefield Accessories wall sections (enough to make two simple houses) have been assembled and are being painted, along with a Faller German, Austrian or Swiss log cabin that I bought at a model railroad shop.

Oh, and there’s a Wespe and that other Kubelwagen still in Tankoberg…but I’m feeling the time is nigh to make a caulk creek / stream following the laws laid down by Nikolas Lloyd.

 

 

A Kubelwagen, a 251/22, a 263 and a 234/3 walk into a bar…

Tankograd had four more come off the production line. Here they are:

From left to right: a Hasegawa Sd. Kfz. 251/22, a Hasegawa Sd. Kfz. 234/3, a Hasegawa Kubelwagen and lastly a Roden Sd. Kfz. 263. The Kubelwagen comes from the Hasegawa ‘Kubelwagen & BMW Side-car’ kit (MT-12) – the rest are stand-alone kits.

The 251/22 was a great kit to complete. The only trouble I had was with assembling the mount for the PaK 40 anti-tank gun. I included a loader holding a PaK 40 shell – he comes from the Italeri “PaK 40 AT gun with servants” kit. The PaK 40 shell is tipped in black – designating it as an AP shell.

The 234/3 was straightforward and lots of fun. Nearly all my comments about the Hasegawa 234/2 apply to it. I included a loader for it too, another figure from the Italeri “PaK 40 AT gun with servants” kit. That particular figure is sitting down andjusting the gun elevation, so he is molded with an elevation wheel in his left hand. I cut it out and glued a PaK 38 shell there in its place – the shell being surplus from the Roden PaK 38 kits I did some time ago. That shell was tipped with white, designating it as HE.

The Kubelwagen was problematic. I painted up the driver seperate to the rest of the vehicle – and then couldn’t fit him into place once he was finished. The steering wheel had to be removed; the machine gun mount and machine gun mount supports had to be re-done (and new supports kitbashed from leftover parts from old sprues). I learned my lesson – glue any drivers into place first and then paint, which is what I’m doing with the ICM Krupp truck.

The Roden 263 wasn’t too hard. I think their decals didn’t work so well for this kit. The large aerial overhead frame was fiddly but turned out OK. There was also a bit of flash on the sprues that needed some careful scalpel-work.

The Kubelwagen and the 263 got standard Dark Grey with heavy dust coats, for the start of “Barbarossa”: 

The 251/22 got my first attempt at a ‘ambush’ paint scheme. I gave it the same paint scheme as per the notes in my Jagdpanzer 38 “Hetzer” book by MBI. Sure, it’s a little bit stylised, but I love it! The 234/3 got a simple disruptive pattern in Citadel’s Goblin Green. I went and added some foliage – Woodland Scenics’ lichen.

So, just gotta get them bikers done and the Recon game can happen…

“Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast!” – ‘Ace’ Rimmer, Red Dwarf

Since starting to play “Panzerfaust: Armoured fist” a few years back until 6 months ago, I’ve had thoughts niggling away in the back of my consciousness about making my own wargaming smoke. I used to have about four litres’ volume of wargaming smoke, a hand-me-down from Stephen at Nunawading Wargames Association. I can’t remember now if I sold it when I was having financial dificulties, gave it away or chucked it – but whatever I did, it wasn’t worth it. His wargaming smoke clouds were made from cotton wool and the ink from parcel markers/whiteboard markers, somehow extracted using Turpentine or Methylated Spirits. They were a perfect mix of dark greys, fluffy but not peeling apart, could be squashed up or pulled apart a little and could serve to show a brewed-up AFV or a wall of smoke from smoke shells or a smokescreen from  smoke dischargers. I haven’t seen any other smoke as nice as that stuff of his.

6 months ago, I decided to finally act. I asked Stephen about how to make smoke like his old smoke puffs / clouds, but he couldn’t remember how it was done and wouldn’t recommend trying it again, as he said it stank; was too much effort and could be done more cheaply nowadays. I’d have to come up with a method myself. I began experimenting with various materials to see what might work and, when my day job permitted, searched the Internet for recipes from others.

I didn’t find much! It seems that very few wargamers are interested in documenting how they made their smoke – if they had even progressed beyond just using white bits of cotton wool (which can be purchased as is). I found a YouTube video that offered a possibility, which I did try, but I finally found sensible advice at Gabriel Landowski’s wonderful e-book, “Miniature Gaming, Volume I” which features his own wargames rules, called “Rules of the Damned Human Race”.

His recipe was refreshingly straightforward – use artifical pillow stuffing and darken it. I purchased some siliconised polyester stuffing from a cloth & craft shop and set to work.

I wasted half a bottle of valuable original (and now extinct) Citadel Black Ink dyeing a sample tuft. It took too much time to dry and left small congealed lumps on individual fibres which looked a little odd. This was going to be impractical. I tried the YouTube method, and sprayed Citadel’s Chaos Black spraypaint directly onto a second sample tuft. This worked well until you picked it up and tried to manipulate it, when the white fibres underneath became visible leaving a very unusual and unrealistic effect (and also staining my hands black).

I wondered about the pillow stuffing – perhaps this was the wrong type of material to use? As a fish-keeper, I had plenty of much thicker polyester filter wool sitting around. I wasted the other half of the Citadel Black Ink dyeing some filter wool. It turned out a marvellous  uniform medium grey, but had hardened the wool considerably – it would not be easily teased apart and was no longer “fluffy” at all. No good.

Here are the three sample tufts, after the experiments detailed above, in order from left to right:

I went to an art & craft shop to enquire about suitable paints or dyes for dyeing the pillow stuffing. Although they could’ve sold me expensive clothing dye for about $50 (I was willing to try it), I bought a simple bottle of basic black acrylic paint and experimented with it. I watered it down to a consistency of 50% – 50% and thoroughly impregnated a sample tuft with it.

Next day, once the tuft was dry, I tested it to see what it would be like if I needed to pull it apart a bit to make a smokescreen – and found wet paint in it’s core! I wrung it out and let it dry over a few more days. No problem. I quickly established an assembly line and now I have great-looking wargaming smoke for an extremely cheap price, with little effort or risk. Here’s a good-sized cloud comprised of a few tufts:

and here’s a ‘group photo’ of the major test tufts and components: , the winning result lying between the paint bottle and the spraycan.

PS. you’ll definitely want disposable rubber gloves, old clothing you don’t mind getting splashed with paint and a work area that can be easily cleaned up and doesn’t matter if not all paint can be removed…alternately, lay some plastic groundsheets / dropsheets / thick layers of newspaper around the place. Getting the wet paint into the fibres got a bit splashy and messy!

Trying to make my own Citadel Black Ink

Having found an original bottle of Citadel Black Ink at a sale, I decided that using a little of it in order to make my own ink was an urgent task. I’ve written earlier about Citadel changing their inks. I’m not impressed with their decision to only sell very-watered down inks – you can water down a stronger product but you can’t make a weaker product stronger!

Using some of my recently acquired, now extremely precious Black Ink, I made a colour card to compare it to their new ink called Radab Black. Here’s the colour card:The difference is very noticeable – you can see how much lighter Radab Black is. Very watered down.

Now, I like a mix of about 50% original Black Ink and 50% water for the inking that I do around the hatches of AFVs…the hatch becomes nicely shaded and the vehicle looks much more three-dimensional (as well as more realistic!).

I used 50% Chaos Black paint and 50% water to try to make Citadel Black Ink. As you can can see from that colour card, 50% paint watered down was too strong. It seemed logical to try a mix half that strength, 25% Chaos Black paint and 75% water, as you can see on that same card. I felt that I was getting closer to the original product, but was still not there quite yet.

I then went right down to a ratio of  (about) 1 part paint to 5 parts water, or about 15%. This was pretty good, as you can see: but 20% Chaos Black to 80% water is what I’ll comfortably call Citadel Black Ink.

I have sealed the original Black Ink bottle with cellotape and made sure the cap was very tightly screwed on. I did the same with the original brown inks I have. Making my own versions of the brown inks is a task that can wait a little while, as I have two bottles of each so there’s less urgency to do so. I did make a point of sealing them and making sure their caps were extremely tightly screwed on. I may even keep all these in the fridge during the upcoming summer.

As for AFVs – at a different sale I bought a Roden Sd.Kfz. 263. Assembling the wheels (see stage 1 on the assembly instructions Henk has on his website) has been unnecessarily difficult. Each wheel has it’s own axle – and trying to get those axles to sit properly while glueing everything led to me stuffing one up horribly. All I could do was cut all of it away, drill new holes for everything and use some brass rod (secured with Flash Cyanoacrylate glue) as a substitute. It worked much better! Why didn’t they just do one axle, moulded on an angle, for two wheels?! Hasegawa have made assembling thier wheels and axles into a pleasure, why can’t Roden?? I’m not sure if I’llbuy any of thier 232s if it’s going to so annoying…

Apart from this grizzle, the rest of the kit has been easy. It looks OK…I feel some of the surface detail could have been raised a little more off the surface to make it more distinct – I guess I’ll see if I’m right about that whenI come to paint it.

Löwe on the streets

The Sd. Kfz 250/3 (an ESCI kit re-released by Italeri) that I’d been working on is finished, as is a house that I’d bought a couple of years back from Battlefield Accessories. Here they are together:

The light green flock on the wall was to simulate moss growing on the northern side of the building…but it’s a little too light in colour, I think. Should be a bit darker. Oh well, you don’t know until you try.

This house is a Ruined Building from the Battlefield Accessories range. Resin kits, simple to assemble and customise. Fairly good detail – except the interior could have used more effort, like window frames and door frames, which it lacks – so the interior is all flat with no detail. Mine has painted up pretty well – I painted it to match the railway station I did some time ago (see much earlier posts on this blog about the railway station).

‘Löwe’ was done with my home-made Dark Grey paint and features my first attempt at making my own air-recognition flag. The flag has turned out OK and I learned a lot doing it. I’ll save how I made it for another blog post but I’m keen to try other methods, like using tissues heavily doused with PVA glue and then painted.

This 250/3 Schutzenpanzerwagen was then given a heavy coat of dust, as I decided that it would represent a vehicle from Operation Barbarossa…and many vehicles on that campaign got very heavily coated with dust while on the march.

Here’s a few more pics of it:

You can see that I didn’t hesitate to make this a GrossDeutschland vehicle…how could I resist, when Italeri nicely provided me with a ’stahlhelm’ decal on their decal sheet?!

I’ve commenced painting the ICM Sd. Kfz 222, and it will look similar to the above as I’ve decided to paint it as a vehicle from the same campaign.

Not what it purports to be

The 250/3 is assembled – another Tankoberg production. Apart from those one-piece vinyl tracks, it was quick and straightforward (and twice those tracks have detached themselves from their glue and required more gluing and clamping…I sprayed the finished unit with more Chaos Black to hopefully seal and fix those tracks, as I’ve heard the same tactic used by another modeller (sparying one-piece tracks with spraycan products to fix/set them)). Even the overhead aerial arrangement turned out not to be so difficult or fiddly, holding and keeping a good shape.

My problem with it is that I then tried to position one of the three crew figures supplied in its cabin…and failed. He was far too big. I already had my suspicions when I looked at the bench for the radio operators in the cabin and decided it was a bit undersized, but now I’ve confirmed it. I’m not sure what scale the vehicle itself is – maybe 1/76? Maybe even a bit smaller? The crew figures are definitely 1/72.  A funker doing his job and using that bench would be sitting with his chin resting on his knees, it’s so low.The MG looks 1/72…perhaps it’s certain parts of the kit where, for simplicity, they made decisions that some features would be smaller? Thus,  the MG is 1/72 but the cabin is 1/80 or something?

This means I’m not going to put crew figures (there are three supplied with this Italeri kit) in it at all. Yay, I’ve got three figures as spares. Boo, I like open-top vehicles to have some crew figure/s involved – otherwise, on the wargames table, it looks like all these empty, crew-less vehicles are moving around under remote control.

Hills or mountains (or both) – ready for war

This terrain project is finished, and I’m pretty happy with the outcome:

The hills in the above photo haven’t had the pins/tacks removed. I’ve put my 1:72 UM Marder III (h) on the larger, to give you some idea of scale.  The spraying of Scenic Cement yesterday and application of extra coarse turf worked perfectly to plug the spots where the first and second glueing attempts with PVA glue failed to thickly coat the area. I also added a few patches of flock/scatter on top of the Scenic Cement to provide extra texture – that too worked well.

The Marder III(h) above is casting a strong shadow against the smaller hill. I’ve talked in earlier posts about how shadows can reveal an AFV’s location – the above example is a practical demonstration of that. Now it should be evident why, in the latter half of WWII, German AFVs stayed under cover during the day or attached lots of branches and foliage to their AFVs if they had to move during the day…because the hard angles and unnaturally-shaped shadows really are noticeable.

These next two photos are of the hills/mountains with pins/tacks removed from their bases, so they look as if they are being used as scenery in a wargame:

I’ve realised with some previously-made hills, I used a finer grade of talus to represent small rocks which I could have done here…I’ll use them with the next lot of mountains / steep hills that I make.

The BZ-35 Refuellers are coming along well – they are receiving a careful solid coating of Catachan Green, which perfectly models the green the Soviets used on their softskins and AFVs.

I’ve commenced assembly of a 1:72  Sd. Kfz. 250/3 by Italeri (kit No. 7034), which was one of kits I bought at the Model Expo Swap & Sell on the Queen’s Birthday Weekend back in June.  It’ll end up being used as a reconnaissance vehicle for encounter scenario games.

Yesterday I began work on painting up a building (4 inch square walls) from Battlefield Accessories. It’ll have the same paint scheme that I used with the AMRI railway station that I painted up last year, for re-creating the fighting around Mga Railway Station in North-western Russia.

Assembling the BZ-35; cut-away StuG III

Since I built the previous PST BZ-35 two years ago, all the papers and documents I gathered about them at the time was carefully put away into two different folders. The two folders’ purposes changed a year ago…and so during the Queen’s Birthday Holiday weekend in June this year, I had an “audit” of them. I located all the photographs and such that I needed for the assembly of these current two kits and the two folders have had their purposes clarified and their contents sorted and stored appropriately.

While doing so, I came across a printout I’d made of a cut-away photograph of a Sturmgeschütz III assault gun/tank destroyer. To my knowledge, this was an actual Sturmgeschütz III captured during the second half of World War II by the Allies, and then dissected by Allied engineers to find out more about these vehicles. You can see the cut-away photo here (scroll down 1/3 of the page) – the side armour and wall has been removed and some engineers are positioned inside, in the crew’s positions, so you can see what the crew space is like during operation.

I had some teething troubles getting the wheels, axles and so-on into place and nicely aligned on these two BZ-35s. This was a problem at first but as I was using brass rod for the axles, I could gently bend the axles into different positions so the wheels were aligned as straightly as was possible. I know I grizzled about this PST kit requiring you to supply extra materials but in this instance it has actually been a boon. If plastic axles had’ve been arranged, I’m not so sure I could have rescued these kits from this dilemma – but then the axles and transmissions might have been differently modelled for kit assembly and this problem might never arise in the first place!

When I’ve had time, things have progressed well with these kits. I didn’t keep written notes about colours used for painting when I assembled some Military Wheels 1:72 GAZ-AAs two years ago, so I’m playing safe and painting the interiors of these BZ-35s the same colour as the exterior (Catachan Green) because that seems to be what I did with those GAZ-AAs.