Fourth & final game for 2009

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.

From love to occasional hate

I’ve finished the assembly of ICM’s kit #72451: Krupp L2H143 Kfz.70. I’d picked it up mid-year, you’ll recall, at the IPMS Expo. This kit hasn’t been easy to work with – unlike the Sd. Kfz. 222, which I’ve already reviewed on this blog and you can find the concluding entry about it here.

Since I’ve been doing the final painting of a base of  Italeri BMW R75 motorcycles I need for this upcoming recon game, I wanted something to work on while waiting for the fiddly painting to dry.  I dusted off the Krupp last week and began work on it building it.

I loved doing the Sd. Kfz. 222…but I haven’t loved this kit. The detail of some pieces is extremely fine. In fact, two parts (front axle, bumper bar) were broken already, and the kit hadn’t even come out of it’s plastic sealed bag! The pressures on the sprue are too intense.  Some more pieces broke while cutting them off the sprue. I was careful cutting pieces free, even using ultra-sharp hospital scalpels (thanks to my inside contact).

So, there’s been attempts to fix broken parts with lots of fancy gluework (and me having to work in short spurts to escape the fumes) and some straight-out kitbashing with brass wire and cyanoacrylate superglue. Fancy gluework didn’t work for the crucial parts, leading to frustration and a number of points where I was going to give up and turn the whole lot into spares. The front axle was one of these prickly points – I ended up replacing it with brass wire and had to use lots of cyanoacrylate to get everything to finally stay solid.

Once assembled, though,  it looks pretty good. However, I’m not going to buy any more (unless they are $5 AUD each or less) and I have to recommend that this is a kit for advanced modellers only.

Oh, and by the way – Italeri have launched a new version of their website!

First ICM Sd.Kfz. 222 Leichter Panzerspähwagen (kit #72411) rolls off Tankoberg assembly lines

It’s done! My first Sd. Kfz. 222! Painted in standard (homemade) Dark Grey, with white Balkankreuzes and covered in a heavy coat of dust  , this is meant to depict a reconaissance vehicle during Operation Barbarossa.

This is ICM’s  Sd.Kfz. 222 Leichter Panzerspähwagen in 1/72 scale, kit #72411. I mentioned in this post that it looked like the fiddly parts of it (axles etc.) were pre-done but of high quality, so it should be easily to build. Well, it was! A pleasure to build, paint and look at.

Why has it taken so long to finish if it was so straightforward and easy? Well, that’s called Real Life – it keeps interrupting me and my hobbies ^_^

I need 6 to make a proper recon platoon – will I be buying 5 more of these kits? I certainly will! This is my first ICM kit (I do have a truck to do, too, but it’s still in its box) and I’m very impressed with it.

I do have one recommendation to modellers – do be prepared to make some modifications to the photo-etched wire screens on the turret. I glued the guns in place on a very, very slight elevation above horizontal and found that the photo-etched wire screen wouldn’t sit neatly on the turret. It was the 20mm cannon barel that was causing the trouble. To remedy this, I cut away some of the frame and made a neat slot to accommodate the barrel, as you can see in this close-up: .

It looks a little funny and wouldn’t pass muster in a modelling competition but will do the job for wargaming. So, if you’re thinking of buying this kit and want to have the guns raised to horizontal or above, you’ll have to think carefully about how to model and attach those anti-grenade wire screens.

Star/umbrella aerials for WWII German AFVs – more about how I did mine

I used Brass Wire that I bought from a model train hobby shop (which is also where I get a lot of my terrain materials, like Woodland Scenics products).  The main aerial is made from 0.033″ diameter wire, with the prongs coming off it made from 0.022″ diameter.

Now, as you saw from my August 23 blog post, “ICM’s Sd.Kfz. 222, cars, bikes and aerials!“, the finished star aerials look a little bit thick and chunky. To do a new set of vehicles (since I’ll do any more 234/2s with the same wire for the sake of uniformity) I’ll be using thinner diameter brass wire – probably the 0.022″ for the main aerial and then the next thinnest type that I can purchase from the model train shop for the prongs. I’d probably also use a less viscous bottle of Flash Cyanoacrylate, so that I don’t have to trim away any excess dried glue. Still, these were the only materials I had on hand or could purchase – so, I’m fine with what I’ve done so far and learnt from the process. Next time, I’ll try to order some materials in advance and not rush things.

I’d done some research to try to determine how many prongs these aerials had – the historical photos I had access to in various books showed vehicles with 6 prongs, vehicles with 5 prongs and vehicles with 5 main prongs plus one small horizontal prong. Hasegawa’s instructions for the kit seem to advocate a 4 prong aerial. Since I rediscovered the online Bundesarchiv earlier in the month, I spent some time ploughing through that, doing very general/broad searches like ‘ostfront 1941′, ‘ostfront 1942′ etc.

Here is one illustrative result: GrossDeutschland on the march.  You can see that, unlike Hasegawa’s suggestion that the main aerial stopped at the prongs, that the main aerial did go a little higher or feature a verticle sub-prong after the prongs. I have photos of two different Sd. Kfz. 263s (in Milsom & Chamberlain’s 1974 book ‘German armoured cars of World War Two’) with 5 prong aerials but showing that the main aerial continued after the prongs or had a vertical sub-prong. I’m not sure about how often a horizontal sub-prong just under the bigger prongs was used (you can see what I’m talking about in the Bundesarchiv example above). Looking through images using different search engines, I mostly saw 5-prong versions of what Hasegawa recommend modellers do. I’ve no doubt that there were different types of star/umbrella aerials…I was just hoping to find something more definitive than I did.

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.

ICM’s Sd.Kfz. 222, cars, bikes and aerials!

So far, ICM 1:72 kit #72411 has been very straightforward to assemble. Part fit has been very good. There’s been a little bit of flash on the mudguards but otherwise it’s needed nothing but glue and cleaning up where I’ve cut each piece from it’s sprue. Assembly instructions are pretty clear – there’s one stage where one action is meant to be done three more times…but you get the drift from the pictures.

Also rolling along the Tankoberg assembly lines have been a Hasegawa Kubelwagen and BMW motorbike w/ sidecar – kit #31112 which I picked up last weekend at an IPMS Swap & Sell.

I’ve been experimenting with something else, too. After researching and consulting a number of sources online and in person, I decided to go ahead and try to make star/umbrella aerials for my Pumas, as I am well aware that they were used on these vehicles. Consulting photos in books and from the Bundesarchiv (the picture archives of the Federal Archives of Germany) left me a little unsure of how many prongs such an aerial should have…some vehicles had 6 prongs, some had 5. I decided to go with 5 for my Pumas after seeing a 251 with a 5-prong aerial and two different Sd. Kfz 263s with 5-prong aerials.

They aren’t so hard to make. Here are the steps I took:

One: Collect these materials – brass wire of two different thicknesses; some superglue or, in my case, Flash Cyanoacrylate (dangerous stuff but powerful); needlenose piers; wire cutters and lastly clamps or a modeller’s mate like this one to hold things for you..

Two: shape the thinner brass wire into a triangular shape. . Also cut yourself a reasonable length of the thicker brass wire – in my case, about 5 – 6 inches.

Three: bend the two ends so that they run parallel and can touch each other flatly. Lock the thick brass wire into one clamp of the modeller’s mate and lock the thin brass triangular bit into the other clamp – bring the flat ends of the triangular wire so that they touch flatly along the thick wire and superglue them into place: . Let everything dry.

Four: repeat Two and Three with another triangle, except it needs to be at an angle of about 75 degrees to the first triangle. You’ll need to cut off one side of the glued-on triangle to permit this. When all is dry, cut off the side of the second triangle – now you should have 4 prongs radiating off from the thick brass wire.

Five: make the last prong and glue it on to make 5 prongs – hopefully the two triangles you glued on and cut away result in 5 fairly evenly-spaced prongs.

Six: when everything’s dry, take out of the clamp and use a scalpel to cut away any excess lumps of glue.

Seven: use the wire cutters to cut the prongs to a suitable anduniform length: .

Eight: stickytape the aerial to something and undercoat it:

Nine: glue into place on the vehicle and paint when the glue’s dry. It’s that easy!

Looking forward to this kit: ICM #72411; Sd.Kfz. 222 Leichter Panzerspähwagen

It was either tonight or tomorrow night for another blog post – tonight won the die roll.

With the Sd.Kfz. 250/3 nearly done and just waiting to get some materials to make star/umbrella aerials for the Sd.Kfz. 234/2 Pumas, I feel I can begin to assemble ICM’s kit #72411. The drive train, axles and such are detailed but mostly pre-assembled!

Have a look at the relevant  sprue:  and the assembly instructions:

This recon AFV clash game is looking good!

BZ-35 Refueller

The weather is still rather unfavourable here,  so all that happened this weekend was getting some undercoating done. I managed to get the following coated:

• Sd.Kfz. 250/3
• Wespe
• Sd.Kfz. 222
• Krupp L2H143 Kfz.70

which leaves just two Hasegawa Pumas to go.

In the meantime, I’ve turned my attention to trying new products as well as completing a couple of kits that have been sitting around undercoated and waiting for such a “rainy day” as this.

I tried out Hob-e-tac again, doing up two Tree Armatures as Birch trees in early Autumn.  As well as using Woodland Scenics products (like those just mentioned), I found a wonderful (coarse) turf by a different company, Scenic Express, called “Early Autumn blend”. It has what I consider the perfect blend of yellow, light orange, red and woody grey colours in it. Having just gone through Autumn here, I was able to watch and compare all the Birches here with the various modelling products by these two companies. This was definitely the closest thing to reality.

The Hob-e-tac became super-tacky right on cue and easily adhered to all the Early Autumn Blend, with almost none coming off after curing…I’ll never try doing that with PVA glue, I’ll stick (bad pun) with Hob-e-tac every time. I then used some Early Autumn Blend around the base of the tree, to represent fallen leaves. The final result is a little stronger yellow than reality, but I think it’s still more than suitable.

No other terrain – no hills work this weekend.

Now, those two kits that I undercoated a while ago…they are of a Soviet BZ-35 Refueller truck. I’d already assembled and painted one up two years ago – these were put aside because 1) the kit was fiddly to assemble, 2) I had no need for any more at that stage of wargaming, 3) I had other, more important and necessary kits to work on . Which particular kit am I referring to? PST’s 1:72 kit, #72021, “Fuel Truck BZ-35″.

The kit is fiddly because not all parts are supplied – you need to provide your own “metal kernals” (their words). I’ve been using brass wire to meet that requirement. Assembly has to be done in a number of stages, more than they indicate on the instruction sheet. However, the end product, after the fiddling is completed, is very nice.

The BZ-35 is built using the same components and chassis as the ZIS-6 truck.  For Soviet WW2 information, I head to Alex’s RKKA in World War II website, which I’ve found extremely useful since I took the plunge into WW2 wargaming four years ago. He has a section on Auxiliary Vehicles which includes a page with the BZ-35 on it (as well as others). There’s a nice colour picture there to help me with painting but I also get painting hints from here and here (with this latter one, scroll down past the political message/s so you can see the heading “Trucks, pickups, buses and special trucks” and start from there).

Assembly of the two kits is halfway complete. They’ll keep me going while I finish undercoating all the other stuff – I want to start all the other stuff simultaneously, rather than doing things in dribs and drabs.

Successful Swap & Sell

Last weekend was Model Expo 2009. I was going to enter some of my Germans in the Wargaming Army competition but have pushed those plans back to next year. I did attend the Swap & Sell, which I’ve done four times.

I was able to purchase two ICM kits (as well as a fair few other things!) which will be interesting to assemble. Here’s a link to ICM’s web site.

I had been contemplating buying some of their kits to begin a Reconaissance Platoon, with SdKfz 222s. Well, I was fortunate enough to be able to buy one of ICM72411 Sd.Kfz.222 WWII German light armored vehicle.

I also purchased one of   ICM72451 Krupp L2H143 Kfz.70 WWII German light truck.

I would have purchased more of each if I could, but one of each was all that was available. Once I’ve got these Tigers finished, then I’ll be moving on to these kits.

***

Oh, and as for Bing trumping Google in useage last week? Well, with all the heavy advertising across every last web page Microsoft has influence over, why wouldn’t it do so for a week? People will try it out for a short while. It’s whether they stay with it. I certainly am not.