Eastern shacks by Battlefield Accessories are complete!

It’s only taken two years and ten months, but the Eastern shacks I bought from Mike Parker of Battlefield Accessories are complete! They turned out very nicely too. I recommend them.

As you can see, the roofs are detachable and each shack almost holds a fire team.

I think I have enough Russian buildings for now. I really need to concetrate on AFVs and guns.

I’ll only buy more Eastern Front buildings if they turn up for good prices at Swap & Sells.

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Cobwebs and dust

Just done a little sweeping and tidying, as this last week I am recommencing work on miniatures. I’m glad to see many of you whom I had links to are still publishing your blogs!

I can’t say how much I’m going to publish here. Probably just sporadically.

I’m trying to get these peasants’ storage huts out of the way, so I can finish the second platoon of Panthers, and then so I can start work on a number of prebuilt kits I’ve bought that were part of “vehicle graveyard” Ebay lots.

 

Today was Nunawading Wargames Association’s 2012 Open Day

Nunawading Wargames Association (NWA) is the wargaming club I belong to, and have done for almost two decades.

I toddled along to have a look at what my fellow members were demonstrating for the annual Open Day, which is six hours of participatory and demonstration games for the public to take part in.

To be fair to my blog, I’ll only show you WWII Eastern Front, which was being run by my good colleague cheetah185, and whose blog In my own time I have already linked to (see my set of links to other blogs). Cheetah185 and mates were running a Stalingrad game. Here’s their explanation to the public of what is being presented:  . Here’s the map/board:    – notice all the aircraft? Russian fighters and German bombers. Here are photos of the action:      .

I did some shopping – I had to! I bought a Raupenschlepper Ost with Flak kit by ACE Models and I bought four resin Russian shacks from Mike Parker @ Battlefield Accessories:  . The Russian shacks will serve as animal pens, wood sheds, farm worker’s shelters, hunter’s lodges or whatever they are required for. Here are photos of the details of these shacks:    and for scale purposes, here’s a BA armoured car parked right next to/in front of one:  .

 

 

Entrenching my troops

At some time in the last 18 months, I bought some fortifications from Battlefield Accessories. The particular ones I bought have three sides and are made of dug earth reinforced by wood and topped by sandbags. You can see the four I bought and have finished painting and flocking here: . I thought they would be good for indicating which of my guns were dug-in or entrenched and which are not. Here they are with my PaK 40s: .

They are well cast from resin, are single pieces with minimal bubbles or flashing to deal with. I wash mine in warm-to-hot water with dishwashing liquid in it. I then undercoat them (when dry) with Citadel spraycan Chaos Black and they take Citadel Paints well.  Hopefully I’ll be using them in a game against Peter soon.

“Battlefield Accessories” is not MIA!!!

While at Little Wars Melbourne 2010 yesterday morning, I was pleased to see Mike from Battlefield Accessories in attendence and trading.

He explained that he is “between ISPs” at the moment, which explains why his internet site brings up a ‘Server not found’ error when you try to access it. He’s very much in business, however, producing his excellent wargaming terrain products and hopes to have his website back online in the next couple of weeks or so.

I bought a couple of barbed wire fence sets from him and will put a couple of pics of them here soon, so you can see how good his stuff is.

Oh, and no, I’m not being paid by him to write this.

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!

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.

 

 

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.

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.