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…

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.

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.

I love the detail, I’ve got to boogie…

Painting the two BZ-35s has commenced…finally.  A front wheel fell off one just when I thought all glueing was finished so I had to do more glueing of axles and I also decided to use to Tamiya Putty (Basic type) to really lock down the wheels on the rear axles.

The finished product is nice to look at, though. Definitely a worthwhile PST kit to get if you want to game the Eastern Front (or Ostfront)…sadly, it seems PST has gone very quiet of late and so you may have to hunt around hobby shops and/or Ebay to get them. It’s really a shame, because I’ve also assembled and painted their Soviet KV-1s and KV-2s (in 1:72 scale, of course) and they turned out very well.

The silly title for this post is because while working on assembling the front of each refuelling truck, the instruction sheet said I had to glue on the radiator caps.

Yes, glue on a tiny radiator cap.

On the sprue, was indeed a tiny little radiator cap.

“Well”, I thought, “that’s detail for you. They could have easily included the radiator cap fixed in place as part of the mould, but to show you how much external detail this kit can have, they’ve given me a radiator cap to glue on”. It goes right where there is a bit of flash that actually looks like a radiator cap already, which just makes it seem even stranger. (Yes, even the kit assembled two years ago also had this radiator cap-shaped piece of flash on it).

I clipped the radiator caps off and glued them in place, which was a little trickier than I expected – the top of the radiator gently curves, so they initially won’t sit flatly.

***

The small hill was finished last sunday, the glue holding the coarse turf on the big one hadn’t fully dried in some patches so I had to re-do it during the week. Today I sprayed it with Scenic Cement to seal it and added some more flock and coarse turf to try to cover up the less successful patches. Tomorrow night I’ll have a look at it – I’m keeping it in a warm room to speed the drying.

Also commenced painting up a shelled house!

Bare earth to living rock: worked on the hills / mountains

Today was warmer than I expected and as I didn’t have any major duties to attend to, I worked on those wargaming hills (or mountains, as I proposed in an earlier post) because of the favourable weather.

Here’s how you too can complete this stage of hill-making:

1. Prepare the area where you’ll be working by laying down lots of newspaper to catch dripping glue and all the modelling materials that won’t stick to the hill(s). If you don’t do this, you’ll have small rocks, flock and other stuff going everywhere. I like to use the Weekend Australian (once I’ve finished reading it, of course):
2. Apply PVA glue/woodworking glue. The majority of your brush strokes should be from the middle of the hill to its base or rim:  and you should also make sure the coat completely covers the whole hill (except underneath);  fills every nook and crevice and lastly is not too thin (I like to apply a thick coat, personally): – it can smooth out hard edges or sharp corners and also plug gaps where polystyrene spheres have popped out during carving or shaping.
3. If you want to have any exposed rocks or gravel, now’s the time to do it. First I sprinkle on larger rocks (Woodland Scenics’ Talus): then the smaller ones: . If any bounce off or fail to stick, then gather them up from the newspaper and sprinkle them on again or press them gently into place with your fingers.
4. To give the hill/mountain the appearance of having been scoured by the winds, I’m going to apply Earth flock to the top. Not too much, though:
5. Then it’s time for my grasses, so on goes a thick coating of Green flock: . If you look closely, you can see that the edge of the base (or rim) hasn’t had any flock stick to the glue. I pick the hill up in my hand and shake on more flock, so that it does get coated by flock. Then I press down with my hands onto the hill, forcing everything into the glue and making sure everything sticks that can. Some flock and some rocks/Talus may be dislodged by this, so get the Green flock and liberally coat the hill one final time. Then leave it to dry.

The bigger hill, which had one big peak and one smaller peak was done a little differently. Its features allowed more detail to be applied.

1. On goes the two different sizes of rocks/Talus:
2. There is a gully betweenthe two peaks. As water would naturally gather there, I emphasise this feature by gluing some bushes there (Woodland Scenics’ Bushes):
3. For wind-scouring, it’s time for Earth flock:
4. Being a bigger hill or mountain, I can model thicker grasses etc. around the lower altitude by using a blend of coarse turf:
5. Lastly, the finer grasses – Green flock:
6. Make sure that the rim gets covered in flock; press down with hands; a final coating of Green flock and then leave it to dry.

I’m going to give them 24 hours to completely dry or cure…24 hours is my usual for nearly everything with modelling, except when doing fine painting.

Many modellers and wargamers will tell you that you don’t have to use all the things I’ve used, and I agree with them. Some people use fishtank gravel or cat litter or stones they’ve found out in Nature – if you also want to do that, do it! It’s your hill and your imagination. If you want to stick on some twigs you’ve found to represent fallen branches or logs, do it! I’ve done that with both my Russian and German infantry bases, to give particulr troops some extra cover. If you want to apply some ashes to represent burn-off or scorching, you could.

I’ve used Woodland Scenics products exclusively today (apart from the PVA glue, which is made locally by Selleys). The particular products I used were:

• Blended Turfs
• Talus
• Bushes
• Coarse Turf

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.

Back to Tigers

As I got closer to finishing the SdKfz 7/1, I commenced work on two command Tigers. They are the same Revell kit as before, except this time I had plenty of experience in assembling them (and knowing where to stop and do steps in a different order, as well as drill out the holes ahead of time) to draw upon.

This time, the track sag is a lot better…it looks a bit more natural then the previous four, where everything felt too angular. Instead of straight lines and sharp angles, the result was closer to a lazy curve, which is what I wanted.

The Doug Chaltry Technique was completed pretty quickly…I had two evening shifts the previous week and we had some warm weather too, so all those ink coats were done two each day rather than singly. I’d like to mention that the Eastern Express tracks that I used on the SdKfz 7/1 took the Doug Chaltry Technique wonderfully – so much so that if I see any more cheap at Swap-n-Sells, I’ll be buying them just to keep the tracks for when I have vinyl tracks to replace! (Yes, I do have kits yet to do with vinyl tracks, so stay tuned).

I don’t have star aerials to put on these two tanks. A colleague and fellow member of NWA has star aerials on his command vehicles and they look fantastic. I don’t have any and can’t think of any way to effectively kitbash them at this scale…I’d welcome advice if you, good readers, do. I’m just going to give them a second shorter aerial mounted through the roof of the turret.

Speaking of Nunawading Wargames Association, we had one of our two annual Sale Nights on Friday. I picked up (after cleaning and assessing them today): 50-odd conifers in 6mm-15mm scale, which will be perfect for my 15mm other wargaming interest; 10 conifers that will be ok for 1:72/1:76 and eight ready-made plastic kit trees. I’m not sure if they are Woodland Scenics Tree Armatures or an imitation. Either way, they are certainly very old and have been exposed to a lot of heat over their lifetimes, as the plastic has become pretty brittle and I snapped off lots of finer twigs and branches just trying to clean them up and get them ready for undercoating. There are enough major boughs and sturdy branches to proceed – I threw away the trees that didn’t survive the cleaning process.

The tree kits we perhaps the best buy of the night (for me), as now I have an excuse to make some trees in Autumn colours. I’ll probably go with Woodland Scenics for them, although if I can be impressed enough by Heki then I may explore that path just for this project. If my experimenting is successful, then I may decide to do more Autumn trees…

Road building

There’s nothing like a heatwave to slow my work right down. That being said, all the paintwork on the roads is done.

First I inked in all the ruts, puddles and potholes:

At this stage, I was still unsure that the final product was going to be worth the amount of effort that I was putting in to it. By the way, the ink mix was 50% Chestnut  Ink and 50% water.

With the Kayak Brown to represent dried mud / solid earth, it was time to represent the soaking wet mud and the somewhat dried mud. This was done by making a roughly 60%-40% blend of Vermin Brown and Kayak Brown for the somewhat dry and pure Vermin Brown for the soaking wet.

The soaking wet mud could only be lying in and around the lowest parts of each part of road – because water always settles in the lowest places. This is where remembering what happens in Nature is all-important…there’s nothing like going out and seeing something first to get it perfect in your mind before trying to model it! In the least, use a good search engine to look at plenty of images of what you want to model – and don’t forget to make notes of the minutiae.

So, here are photos of the completed paintwork:

I’m happy, but once it’s cool enough for me to work in the hobby room without breaking into a sweat in seconds, I’ll put some Green Blend flock on the edges for grass, Dullcote each piece and call them finished.

Tanks and felled trees…impassable terrain 3

The “felled trees” impassable-to-vehicles terrain piece is finished!

I was unconvinced that I’d done a good job until after the Dullcote was dry – I don’t know why, and I’m sure lots of wargamers and modellers probably don’t add a protective varnish coat to terrain, but I find it has a slight darkening affect but also makes the ingredients look more natural and more to scale.

With this piece, I was just going to stick to using the Dark Green Bushes…but I ent all out and even added some Forest-blend bushes as well. They turned out pretty well! I did expend all my “useful” lichen, though, so I went and picked up three single packs of lichen (natural colour, light green and medium green) so I can work on some big hills over Christmas (more about this another time).

Here’s two Jagdpanthers so that you can see the camouflage patterns / scheme that I used:

Today I finished all the annoying details and applied the decals. Tomorrow is just fixing up the remaining odds & ends with Desert Yellow and then I can do the weathering with Kommando Khaki.

The Tigers also had all detail finished and will get final Desert Yellow touching-up tomorrow, but I didn’t get up to decals. I really want to finish these Jagdpanthers, so I’m driving hard (bad pun, I know) to finish them first, so that the Tigers can get more care (because I can use them more in games).

Impassable terrain 2

When I last posted, I was at the following stage of my “felled ground” project:

The “tree stumps” (hand-sawn twig cuttings) had been glued to the shaped sheet styrene base.

Since then, it has received two undercoats of good old Kayak Brown acrylic housepaint (I need to buy a new pot too, it’s almost dry – after 10 years, I might add – good value!):

and then I had to think about how to make it look natural – what ground cover, ground effects, bushes and the like had to be added.

This required recalling the logged areas I’ve visited and also recalling what bushfire damage (and the subsequent regrowth) looks like. I decided to have some brown earth tyre/wheel/tank track marks going through the middle, with just weeds and smaller bushes there. I wanted big bushes in between the tree stumps. I wanted my green grass on the edge. I wanted small ground cover (big weeds and small weeds) everywhere else.

Once I’d liberally applied glue to the base (careful around the tree stumps, of course), I began to apply everything as outlined above. I used all Woodland Scenics products (except for a couple of bits of Heki flock that were in my homemade hill-making grass mix). The tye tracks ended in the middle of the felled ground, where I decided a vehicle had been blown up – so to liven the piece up, I added some black coal flock to represent scorched ground. This looked pretty good, so a few more patches of scorched ground were added here and there – remember, the Germans often burnt forests to flush out partisans! I wanted that to be represented in this piece. Also remember – if what you end up with looks better than what it did in your mind, then keep doing what it was that you did to make it so good. I am a big believer in that rule, especially when making hills.

The bushes were a mixture of light green and medium green chunks of cut lichen, with small bramble bushes of natural-coloured lichen. Big weeds were dark green foliage chunks sprinkled around, and small weeds were a mix of light and dark coarse turf. Then some more grass flock was sprinkled to try to cover any remaining bare spots.

I couldn’t press down/push down all these things to really make sure everything was adhering to the glue, as it would have stuffed up layout and stopped over things glueing properly. So, all I could do was make sure the room was warm (so the glue would dry/cure properly) and hope for the best.

24 hours later, I shook off all loose materials and was left with this:

Not bad, but still far too much uncovered undercoat. Disappointing, but certainly no disaster.

The course of action from here is as follows:

1. Spray on watered-down glue and add some more of all the above materials in order to cover bare paint.
2. Allow to dry.
3. Shake off excess.
4. Check for any final touching-up.
5. Seal with a light coat of varnish.

I’ve come to the realisation that while this piece of terrain will be impassable to vehicles, it isn’t a truly impassable piece of terrain (like a lake or quicksand are) because soldiers on foot, horseback or motorbike (kettenkrads, anyone?) could certainly move through it. So, it will be impassable to vehicles larger than motorised cycles. The big bushes will block some line-of-sight (LOS) and it will still slow down those on the hoof/foot/bike. Gameplay will finalise my decisions.