Just Trucking

Continuing my 6mm project this is the Admin (motor pool) element for my first Infantry Battalion. I just need to finish off the carrier platoon stands and the Battalion will be done! Rather than press ahead with the next Infantry Battalion in the Brigade I will probably do one of the Divisional support elements, armored recon, AT or something so I can paint something different. Then I'll switch back to an Infantry Battalion and go back and forth like that until the Division is completed.

Off to Partizan on Saturday! spent last night packing terrain and miniatures into boxes and now have 6 large plastic crates of terrain blocking up much of the bedroom. Looking forward to meeting up with the chaps, and seeing the game come together (as well as picking up some traditional loot!)

6mm Battalion Support Elements

You may recall a previous post which showed off the 4 Company's which make up the Infantry elements of the 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders which in turn form part of the larger 51st Highland Division which I am working on.

Well having finished most of my Partizan stuff I had time last night to paint up and base 4 of the stands which are part of 2nd Battalion's support elements.

As before I have tried to make the command stands as little diorama's and I'm pleased with the results. I painted the trucks just green and canvas this time as the camo pattern on my previous ones was not working for me, and wasn't really accurate anyway. Not pictured are the previous Company HQ stands which I have also repainted to match these.

This is the Battalion Commander stand, which comprises of 3 figures a truck and staff car.

AA Platoon, which in this period in an infantry Battalion was just the Bren Gun mounted on the air defence tripod. I modeled this to look like one team has already setup and the other two have just piled out of the back of the lorry and an officer is pointing them to their setup point.

Mortar Platoon, in time I might make some stores to put in the trailer from putty or something.

Signals Platoon - I just decided to go with a Tilly and trailer here. I think in reality these guys had a truck, but I went with the Tilly as I used to be in Signals in the RAF and we rocked around in land rovers with trailers so I went with this as the period equivalent! I overdid the reflection on the glass a bit so the front of the Tilly looks a bit like it has eyes, but its all good.

Still do do is the Carrier Platoon and Pioneer Platoon as well as the Admin Platoon. The Admin Platoon was basically the Battalion motor pool so I have just got a selection of trucks for this, same goes for the Carrier Platoon I have just based some Bren Gun Carriers.

The Pioneer Platoon is more difficult, in reality it had access to Motorbikes (one I believe) and I would like to model this, if anyone knows if any figure makers make a 6mm motorbike please leave a comment, otherwise I will bodge one from putty.

Once the remaining Platoons are painted (I only have the Pioneer Platoon to make) the 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders will be complete!

The benefit of building my units in the way I am is that I can use the stands to represent Platoon's and Company's or squads depending on what size of 6mm game I wanted to play.

The eventual order of Battle for the Division will be as follows

1st (Highland) Infantry Division, 1939-1940

152nd Infantry Brigade

2nd Battalion, The Seaforth Highlanders (regular army)
4th Battalion, The Seaforth Highlanders
4th Battalion, The Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders

153rd Infantry Brigade

4th Battalion, The Black Watch
1st Battalion, The Gordon Highlanders (regular army)
5th Battalion, The Gordon Highlanders

154th Infantry Brigade

1st Battalion, The Black Watch (regular army)
7th Battalion, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
8th Battalion, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

Divisional Support Units
1st Lothians & Border Yeomanry
75th (Highland) Regiment, Royal Artillery
76th (Highland) Regiment, Royal Artillery
77th (Highland) Regiment, Royal Artillery
51st (West Highland) Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery
236th Field Company, Royal Engineers
237th Field Company, Royal Engineers
238th Field Company, Royal Engineers
1st Battalion, The Princess Louise's Kensington Regiment (The Middlesex Regiment) (Machine Gun)
7th Battalion, The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers(Machine Gun)
7th Battalion, The Royal Norfolk Regiment (Infantry Sappers)
6th Battalion, The Royal Scots Fusiliers (Infantry Sappers)

As you can see I have a hell of a lot to do before this project is anything like complete, but its meant as a seriously long term project as the Division's history in the early period has always interested me.

Wheel Arch Repair

 As the name of the post suggests this is a quick post about how I spent the last couple of very sunny days. If your interest in cars is no existent then by all means run for the hills now as you will no doubt find what follows a bit dull.

As the first picture shows I found some rust had developed around my rear drivers side wheel arch over winter. Living in rural Scotland I wasn't really surprised as the car spends a lot of the year coated in salt from the roads. My car is a little over 10 years old and not worth much more than a few grand now a days so I wasn't going to pay to have the paintwork repaired. So I decided to just repair the body work myself, I've never done a large repair like this before so it was a bit of a learning experience.

 Firstly I masked off the wheel arch so I could sand off the paint and rust without fear of slipping and knackering the rest of the paintwork. I masked off to the first lip of the arch so that when I spray the area the edge where my new paint meets the factory paint is more natural and looks like a shadow.

Working first with aluminium oxide sandpaper to remove the rust I then used varying grades of sandpaper to sand the metal and paint work as smooth as I could. I'm not looking for a pro finish as the car is old just something I can live with.

You can see from the circular marks on the metal where the rust had been starting to affect the metal given enough time the rust would have eaten through the wheel arch. 

 All smoothed off and ready for undercoating. If the car was newer and I wasn't lazy I would have used anti-rust treatment over the area to prevent the rust coming back. As the car only has a couple of years life left in it I didn't bother with the anti-rust treatment.

Undercoated using red primer, having first masked off the area using newspaper and sheets. I covered the back end of the car in newspaper and the rest of the car in a big dust sheet. Its important to cover all the glass on the side you are spraying on as the particles can travel quite far and whilst they might not show up on your body work they will on your glass. 

Having left the undercoat to cure overnight (24 hours) I then hit the area with the correct top coat, I didn't bother sanding between primer and topcoat, but if you want a smoother finish you should. Again my car is old and I wasn't hugely bothered by the finish.

And here's the finished result. Please note the white bits visible in the picture are just bits of masking tape I haven't picked off yet. 

I will wait about 48 hours to make sure the paint is fully cured and then use hot soapy water to take of the last of the masking tape which is still stuck along the spray line. Personally I'm pretty happy with the result its not perfect but unless you stand and stair at the wheel arch its not obvious that its been sprayed. The only bit I didn't do very well is in the bottom right of the picture. I should have taken the paint further over to make the line smoother, but I can live with it.

Anyway that's how I spent some summery afternoons on the driveway, it was cheap easy and quite rewarding. I've got some more major body work repairs (Panel damage following a bump the wife had in the car) to bore you all with at some point in the summer so there's something to look forward to! :D

In modelling related news I had a bash at putting together the Warlord Plastic ECW infantry, they are nice casting but reawakened why I usually avoid plastic infantry like the plague. Will be switching to lead highlanders from their range, and lead Scots from Perry's or Renegade.

This also appears to be my 300th Post so yay me. thanks for all of you who have followed my meandering blog and all the nice comments left by you kind folks over the years. The comments and support received for posts always spurs me onto keep painting and work harder.

Cheers

Fade to Grey

I'll apologise in advance as this is probably not very interesting to most people. But I have spent the evening trying out a new painting style (for me anyway) and thought I would share.

Basically I am going to be assembling a Covenanter ECW army in 28mm in the near future. I already have some figures, as per my earlier post, but I was concerned that my usual painting method of starting with a dark colour and lightening it up to a highlight (usually over 4 to 5 coats for a war-gaming figure, if I was painting a one of figure for my mini cabinet it might be way more) would result in me taking just way way to long to assemble the force. My fear was also that this technique would result in me suffering with project fatigue quite quickly.

So having spent some time looking over some Blogs and the usual hordes of information online I noticed that a lot of people seem to use the Tri-Colour technique to paint big groups of figures. What you  see above is an hour or so's messing around with some figures testing out the colour Grey using the Tri-Colour concept.

I don't have a proper "Tri- Colour" set so I just picked three Grey's from my paint collection that looked like a reasonable match. As such the finish will never look right on the above figures as the paints I have used are just that little bit to far apart tonally, but it let me try the technique and I can see if I am failing technically without needing the right colours.

(Yes I know this is basically a post about me painting Grey on trousers 5 times, dull huh)

So my first attempt at the technique is on the far right labeled as 1 and the last attempt is number 5 on the far left. Some close ups below. There pretty rough as this was just to try the technique not paint a figure for display or anything. Also I have only painted the trousers on each figure so the rest of the figure is just undercoat.

Now I think number 5 shows promise technically speaking as I think I have broadly grasped the way this Tri-Colour thingy should work. It's not super pretty or anything but I think with the right Tri-Colour set applied in this way I can quickly produce  blocks of ECW infantry that look pretty good, and will certainly meet the 2 feet does it look good on the table test.

As I said before colour wise this test set were doomed never to look right as I just didn't have colours that matched closely enough, but I think its enough to tell if I am getting it right or not.

If anyone has made it this far, thanks for reading, and if you have any comments, tips etc regarding Tri-Colour please do leave a comment.

Thanks

So it seems I am weak

This is a start of a new project (and me bitching about how weak I am) the Scots from Warlord are part of my new ECW project which I will be working on for the next few months. The plan is to collect a force and then me and some of the guys from the VBCF Forum will meet up and have a game.

The bitching part of this post is because I broke and bought from Games Workshop having vowed not to give them anymore of my cash.

When I was still but a nipper I wanted to get the Clan Escher gang for Necromunda but what with one thing or another never did. As Games Workshop are waving goodbye to their specialist ranges and won't be producing the figures again I decided to just buy the basic 8 figure gang (which was typically expensive for GW). What can I say I'm weak I've always wanted them and if I let the figures disappear into horrendously expensive collectors land or just vanish entirely I would have been irritated at myself for all time.

So there you have it straight from the horses mouth I am weak and the hobby is strong!

Sand Table

This is the little project I have been working on for the last couple of days, this is for this years game at Partizan and (sad as it is) is a tiny version of this years table layout!

This is supposed to represent the senior Royalist/BUF officers preparing their assault on Leicester and it roughly matches the local map. With the village of Evington in the corner nearest the officer in the red top, North Evington Infirmary is the large building in the middle (see my earlier "Hospital Build" terrain posts) and the outskirts of Leicester itself at the end of the table in the foreground.  Its a silly little thing but I like it and it came out pretty well, all things considered. Obviously its not been made to scale or anything but I think it looks okay and works well as the officers sand table.

Top down view of the map

The camera has done something a bit weird with the colours so the red looks much glossier than it is.

Royalist Officer

Following on from the earlier post regarding the BUF adviser I have this evening bashed through and finished painting up this Artizan figure as a Royalist officer to match my existing force. Its a really simple figure to paint (which again I have painted previously but decided to strip and re-use). I'm pleased although he's not as neatly painted as the other figure as I am in a bit of a rush to try and finish this and other things.

BUF Advisor

I haven't painted a figure in awhile so I thought I would post his up this afternoon. Painted up in about 4 hours (give or take) whilst watching films online. I've painted this figure which is a Paul Hicks available from Empress. I have previously painted the figure but was not really happy with the finish so I stripped it and decided to re-paint it.

I'm really happy with the repaint which is supposed to represented a BUF Officer or Advisor.

Its going to be used in a small Diorama I am building to go with this years Partizan game. Hopefully I will get the piece finished before June!

The other reason I have been so quiet over the last few days is because the project which is taking up most of my hobby time is my entry for this years Trash Bash 2013 (details of the comp are here Trash Bash 2013)
This years competition is to take a computer mouse and use it as the basis for a deep strike type vehicle. We have been asked not to post WIP threads of our entries until after the winner is drawn, so I can't say much more about my entry. But I am pretty pleased with it so far and just hope I can get it painted in time before June 1st which is the closing date!

In case you haven't noticed I really have managed to put myself under pressure to get about 3 things ready all by June!

Spreading the Word

For those of you who like having the opportunity to win prizes you should head on over to Tamsin's rather good blog where she is having a very generous prize draw Wargaming Girl all the rules are on the blog but basically every comment you make bags you an entry in the draw, and if you link to the competition on your own blog that gets you another 5 entries. So here I am shamelessly pimping Tamsins draw for my own ends!

Seriously though check it out she has been very generous with the prizes, and its a top blog.

Partizan 2013 Badges

For those of you who have missed my constant harping on about Partizan PanzerKaput and I are making our yearly trip to Partizan putting on a VBCW game with the chaps from our forum on 2nd June 2013.

This years game is the Siege of Leicester which follows on from the previous two (or three) years games.

Usually we have handwritten badges which last seconds thanks to the less than stellar sticking power of the typical white sticker, and the resistance of most jumpers and shirts to said stickers.

As this year PanxerKaput and I are trying to up our game in terms of the quality of demo game we put on I decided to have some better quality badges made. Luckily this was quite simple as the wife has her own badge/magnet making machine and rustled these up super quick for me. The picture has made the union jack backgrounds look darker than they are but you get the idea.

Mean Streets

I was supposed to have spent today preparing and re-spraying a rear wheel arch on my car which was being affected by a spot of rust, but when I went to do the work I realised the wife had taken the car keys to work with her by accident. This left me in the slightly odd position of suddenly having little to do and having not planned any hobby activities I spent ages buggering about with nothing in particular.

In the end I made up some pavements and tarmac roads for the fronts of my housing blocks. The pavement sections are 30cm long 6mm thick bits of MDF with a pavement texture, and the roads are just 3mm MDF which is also 30cm long that has a tarmac texture. All modular so I can mix and match as required. There simple, and basic but do the job (for little cost)

I intend to make more roads tomorrow but who knows, they are a bit boring to make so I'm having motivation issues.

Can't see the Woods for the Trees

I was alerted to a blooming marvelous bargain by my good friend and fellow blogger PanzerKaput. It transpires that Model Zone are selling bags of 25 Model railway type tree's with the integral plastic fake stump thingy for £19.99. Now this was just too good a bargain to miss and I was straight into Model Zone to get a bag of trees.

I picked a pack of the "spring/summer" trees which looks quite nice and by and large they scale up pretty well with 28mm figures. I have opted to mount the majority of them in multi stands of 3 trees on a CD base. I have the rest individually mounted on 2p coins so they can be placed here and there.

I'm seriously considering going and buying another bag given how cheap and easy this was!

and yes I am aware of what a massive cliche the title is :)

Warehouse

Virtually finished the Warehouse Block from my housing build. I'm not hugely happy with it to be honest. I over did the rust on the roof and I'm not sure it looks right. It's finished though, and it looks okay, Sorry to have bombarded the blog with Terrain building stuff over the last few days, I know its not massively interesting.

Cheers

I used to be a Zombie, then I took an arrow to the knee

Painted this Zombie up between doing terrain stuff over the last few days. Its another of the Studio Miniatures plastics, this time the torn shirt body. I can only presume from the destroyed shirt, and cut abs that when Day Z hit this guy was attacked by a Zombie Hen Party.

Anyway I was fiddling around and decided to do my own take on the old "I used to be an adventurer, then I took an arrow to the knee" saying.

I'm quite happy with how this one turned out, although I think its a bit "over gored" for my liking.

Housing Build: Different Setups

 I've been doing bits and pieces on these for the last few days (amongst other  things), most of the work has been on the warehouse which is starting to take shape, although I'm still not really happy with the roof which was a bit of a make do and mend as I had run out of foam board.

Still I think all in all these are looking pretty good, Just thought I would take some pictures showing how they can be setup differently from a normal street, through to different types of "blocks". I will need to make pavements to run around the edges, and fronts which don't have integral pavements but that should be easy.

Other things on the to do list are chimneys, painting white bits brick colours, finishing the warehouse etc etc.

Painted Telegraph Poles

I've been working on the warehouse block for my housing area today, and I painted up and mostly finished the bases on the telegraph poles. Simple paint job, does the job, the camera has made the insulator bits on the poles look whiter and flatter than they actually are, but I'm happy with the results.

These should add some nice character to my table in the future.

Housing Build - Gardens and cobbles

Over the last couple of nights I've been busy with the Pritt Stick and scissors getting walls, cornerstones and cobblestones down!

I have also added a bit of grass in each garden, and some more as weeds etc around the edges of walls and the like. I'm still deciding whether I will add some more static grass, and maybe some little hedges or something in the gardens for a bit of variety, thing is I want to leave them clear enough for gaming so its a balance.

As you can see I have three "blocks" of houses and a single part finished warehouse (bottom left) I built the warehouse instead of another block of houses as I was running low on foamboard and would not have had enough for a block of houses. The warehouse is going to have a part pitched roof and I am considering either hedgerow's instead of brick walls, or part brick part cladding fences to enclose a car park/loading area.  Either way it will have the same alleyway to the rear so it can be positioned with the houses.

I played around a bit today with  the boards and I have to say I was sadly excited by how I can position them differently and still have a great look. When they are done I'll do some pics showing the various compositions that are possible. 

Lastly an arty alley way shot

I'm rather pleased with how these are looking, the cobble texture fits my needs nicely and and I think looks really nice. Some roof's are a bit saggy in places but by and large I am happy. Still lots to do, and the warehouse to finish before Partizan!