A bit of scratch-building and a bus station

Happy Thanksgiving to all (two days early)! I've got another damned cold! I can't catch a break this season.

Anyway, I was watching my favorite short YouTube wargaming video again and there's a scratch-built CNN truck in it. Here are a couple of stills I took:

It looks to be made out of a GHQ British Leyland DAF T244 truck:

So, I decided if he can do it, so can I. The only bit I'm not sure about is the steps on back. He did a damned good job on those. Anyway, I took one of the same model and spackled the sides and back with green putty to smooth out the canvas pattern. More on this later in a future post.

In other news, my z-scale train station that's now a bus station is finished:

Now I need to extend some sidewalk/curbing out from the front for bus stances. These Faller buildings don't go together as smoothly as the ones by Kibri or Vollmer. It was quite fiddly and a bit of a pain in the ass to get put together. My tiny German town is named "Winzigstadt", which translates to "Tiny Town" in English, so I had to replace the town name on the station. 

This is day one of my four day holiday weekend, so more from me as things progress. Enjoy your turkey!!

It's too cold to go out!! Let's paint!!

A cold, windy, drizzly weekend, which means it's great "staying in and painting" weather. I've had a couple of shipments arrive this week. The first is from Leven Miniatures in England. This is a small company that makes really great 6mm buildings. I bought a large brewery:

A malting house:

And two sets of stone walls:

I'm really impressed with the castings, which require only a bare minimum of tidying up on my part. Very attractively priced too. 

Next, on eBay, I found a small z-scale train station made by Faller, which I got for a steal:

I actually don't think I'll use it as a train station, as for that I want something a bit more imposing, but I think it'll make an excellent bus station!! Add a few stances and some buses that I already have:

It'll look great (hopefully)!!

The 3mm East German BTR-60PB's are also coming along nicely:

I'll have a whole company finished today, all going according to plan (which it generally doesn't).

The horror lurking in my mailbox

Today, a Z scale building that I ordered off of eBay arrived. 

For the last few days, I've really been looking forward to it showing up. It was "used" and the seller said the box had been opened, but it was never assembled. The ad said that all parts were present, as was the instruction sheet. Great!! I got it for $15 including shipping and I've never seen this model go for less than $45!!! Yippee!!

Then I opened the box and found out exactly how the seller was so sure EVERY part was present. The first thing to meet my dismayed eyes was a pile of empty sprues:

There was not one single solitary part on any of the sprues. Not one!! :-O. Then, in the bottom of the box, I spied a pile of the larger parts and a bag holding ALL the small parts:

Oh my God!! Did he cut off every last part to see if they were all there!?! 

Some of these small parts look very much alike and it's going to be a nightmare to put this thing together. The instructions are liberally illustrated, so I can get it done, but oh what a pain in the ass this is going to be! Sigh, what a cruel man he must be.... I bet he takes apart all his kids' Christmas presents before he wraps them :-( You bastard!!

My progress of the last week

Feeling a lot better than last weekend thankfully and I've made some headway on the mountain of projects sitting on the hobby table.

The first thing is, given that I'm working on a 6mm German church and almost all old churches in Europe have an adjoining cemetary, I ordered some z scale headstones. They're made by a small British company called Shire Scenes and carried in the US by The N Scale Architect. They are brass etched and really tiny:

But believe it or not, they actually have legible writing on them!!!!

The one on the top left says "William Flower 1782-1836". Poor sod didn't live to be very old, did he? The instructions say there's no need to prime them, as they were given a post-production coat of varnish. Hmm, we'll see how they take paint.

My 3mm East German T-55's are coming along nicely: 

Because WarPac command tanks had no AAMG's mounted on the turret, I'll use T-55AM's for the bulk of my force and standard T-55's for command. O8 doesn't cast AAMG's on their standard T-55's, so it saves me a lot of filing. As you can see, I like the well "muddied" look. I was in the Army and I never saw any kind of vehicle in the field that wasn't fairly filthy. 

A small order from GHQ has also arrived. A package of 1/285 M551 Sheridans and a Bunker Box:

I suppose this is a good excuse to talk about storage. I use Bunker Boxes or similar boxes made by other companies. 

They come with foam inserts to cushion the vehicles you put inside, but that's still hard on fragile barrels, antennas, etc., so here's my solution, 3mm or 6mm. As all my vehicles regardless of scale go on metal bases, I lay a "carpet" of adhesive sheet magnets in the bottom of the box:

Then it holds everything very securely. I use their foam inserts as a cushion on top and nothing has ever been damaged:

A battalion of Italian armor, with command stands, all in one box! For 6mm vehicles with antennas, I just leave the foam layer out. 

That's it for this weekend. The church should be finished for next weekend. Stand by....

Urban terrain tiles, part 1

This past week, I've had visions of my Altstadt (German old city center) for my 6mm 1981 LANDJUT campaign dancing in my head (see my post of last weekend - 10/12/13). So this weekend, I'm experimenting with the best way to go about this. 

My first idea was to just create urban areas and streets on the styrene sheets I can get at my local art supply store, so I could create modular "tiles" which I could string together to make whole cities, if necessary. So I bought a thick one (.118) to avoid future warpage. I gave it a spritz of light gray primer and was ready to go:

I have some of Noch's beautiful z-scale cobblestone road tape that I planned to lay down and then put houses and businesses in between.

However, it occurred to me that the road tape laid on top of the styrene sheet would give me roads at a slightly higher level than the surrounding grass areas, yards, etc. As we all know, even in the old sections of town, the streets are at a lower level, even if only slightly. Hmmm, back to the drawing board. 

So, I decided that the cure was to use the thick styrene sheet as a base and overlay a thinner sheet (.40) as a top surface from which I could cut out streets, giving me a lower elevation on which to run my cobblestone street tape.  So I duly cut out my streets and I bonded the top sheet to the base:

So far, so good. Now it needed another spray of primer and it would be ready to go. 

Unfotunately, after the primer, it very quickly became obvious that the tape just wasn't going to work. There was absolutely no way to get it to conform closely enough to the curves of the roadbed. So it seems there's only one other, labor-intensive alternative: scribe the roadbed with an X-acto knife, much as I wish there was a faster, easier way. Once I get over the roads hurdle, the actual landscaping should go quickly and promises to be a lot of fun. More when the roads are finished in a satisfactory manner. 

PostScript: No, my scribed lines are too uneven and wander around too much. I'm going to have to think on this some more. But I still feel that styrene tiles are the basic building block. 

Oh, Lord! Yet another new project!?!

Those of you who read my blog are already well aware that I have a terminal case of hobby ADD, so you shouldn't be surprised that I've started tinkering with another tangent. I've long nursed a mental picture of doing a 6mm "Altstadt" for my LANDJUT campaign, meaning the old city center of a German town, so I can work in a bit or urban warfare for NATO v WarPac. I stumbled across these photos of a z-scale train layout showing part of a German town:

And it really peaked my interest. I don't think there's any way I could be less interested in trains, but things like this make me crazy:

Or this YouTube video:

I have several suitable z-scale/6mm buildings, but how to go about basing them within a system that would be expandable to also add on suburban and rural areas?  In other words, GHQ's Terrainmaker is crap!!  I need a new terrain system. One that's actually some semblence of SEAMLESS this time!! (Anybody want to buy quite a few well made Terrainmaker hexes?)

I've looked at Game Craft Minatures' excellent streets and terrain, but the drawback there is that it's all one level. It doesn't really depict lower or higher elevations. And given that Geman "old town" areas NEVER have straight streets for more than half a block, this makes things more difficult, as you can see from this map of the Altstadt section of the German town of Fritzlar:

I need to make twisting, wandering streets. So, to start with, I bought a 7.6"x11" of sheet styrene (.118 thick) as a "tile" to work on and some Noch z-scale cobblestone street tape:

It's a straight tape, but it seems bendable. I can also cut notches from one side to curve it. Also, I bought a large n-scale cobblestone sheet by Busch, for making plazas, etc.:

It still needs blackening and "dirtying". That's one of my z-scale houses to show scale. I also bought several packs of small trees from a line of architectural terrain called Wee Scapes. Not the "big trees in the forest" kind, but the "growing in my front yard" kind, as well as a pack of hedges:

I particularly like the flowering trees. The hedges proved considerably too tall for 6 mm, so I cut them in half lengthwise, so they're now half the height they were. They also make some great sunflowers, which are far too tall for 6mm, even for tall sunflowers, but I'll snip off half the stalk and they'll be fine:

I've already got masses of flock, "bushes", undergrowth, "weeds", etc that I use in my basing, so I think I'm set. Now I just need to produce something. This is a pretty photo-heavy post for not having made anything at all yet, so sorry about that. I really need some "weathered asphalt" paint and I'll be ready to go. 

If anyone already makes similar urban terrain tiles, I'd love to hear your methods and see your work. More from me next weekend!

 

A long weekend of "this and that"

The long Labor Day weekend is here (when I lived in Scotland, it was September Bank Holiday), so I'm trying to catch up on some of the myriad of things sitting half-finished on my hobby table.

I'm just beginning a 1/600 company of Italian M11/39 medium tanks for the 1940 Italian invasion of Egypt. I've also just finished a company of L3/35 tankettes. As usual with my 1/600 stuff, it's all at 1:1.

No command stand for either yet. I always put a couple of infantry on my command stands to represent officers, but I'm fresh out of Italian infantry, so I'll have to wait while more come in the mail from Picoarmor. For my desert bases, I usually stick on a tiny rock or two, maybe a bush, and a patch or two of burnt grass, but I'm beginning to feel it's just a bit too "busy", what with the tanks on there also. 

Finished a Timecast 6mm car garage, though the house and car that will go with it have a while before they'll be finished.

Also, a Z-scale town fountain by Faller. It didn't seem terribly realistic once it was finished per the instructions, so I made a few adjustments, like filling it with Woodland Scenics Realistic Water and creating splashing water with their Water Effects. It came out reasonably well, I think.

I'm also working on converting a GHQ 1/285 river monitor into a 105mm howitzer fire support monitor. 

I've plated over the mortar pit with sheet styrene and created a 105mm turret by cutting off the bustle and most of the gun barrel of an M47 turret, then smoothing off the cut areas. I'm in the process of building a re-bar armor cage for the turret using GHQ's Stryker slat armor (doing which is absolutely fiddly as hell!!). This is what I'm shooting for:

As you can see in the photos of the real thing, the turret actually sat much farther back, closer to the superstructure, but that would require quite an involved conversion. The 40mm turret ring is already cast on the model and it's much easier to fudge reality just a bit and use what's already provided. I'll show you the finished product soon. 

And for my West Germans for LANDJUT 1981, I'm working on some 1/300 Heroics & Ros Green Archer counter-battery radar vehicles and several Mungas from Dragoman on Shapeways.com. As you can see, I've only gotten as far as the base coat of gelboliv. 

3-D printing has a long, long way to go in both product quality and affordability. Having bought several 3-D printed items, I have to say that the quality level is marginal at best and the prices are extortionate for what you get. 

Pretty much an endless supply of other things to show you and talk about, so more next posting!!  Hope you had a good holiday. 

So many irons in the fire

As usual, I'm tinkering with a variety of projects this weekend. Too damned hot to go do anything (heat index is 106°F today), which is just as well, since I have so many half-finished things clamoring for my attention.

First up, I'm finishing off four of GHQ's LVTP-5's for my Vietnam War, two of which I've converted. One is now a LTVC-5 (command version) and the other is a LTVH-5 (105mm howitzer fire support). I modified an M47 tank turret, which the real vehicle's turret somewhat resembles. I cut off the turret bustle and most of the barrel and filed the cut areas smooth.

Left foreground is the fire support version. Left background is the command version (the only difference is a lot more antennas). Both models on the right are the standard version. As you can see, I've only weathered one so far. 

I'm also working on two M163 Vulcans. Only six were sent to Vietnam, none of which had been fitted with their targeting radar. The first two of the six had the dish, but it wasn't connected to anything. Numbers three thru six had no dish. When the threat of the NVA's sizeable helicopter fleet never materialized, the Vulcans were used in base perimeter defense and as fire support for road convoys. 

I have to say that at this scale, decals are a nightmare. Again, I've only weathered one thus far. 

I'm also just beginning five East German T-55's for my early 80's LANDJUT campaign. I've test-fitted one with national insignia decals on the turret, but not yet vehicle numbers. Again, 1/285 decals are an almighty pain in the ass!!

So far, they've only received their base coat of East German panzer olivgrün.

I'm also beginning a new z scale house. Actually two houses on one base. 

As usual with these German-made kits, it has an enormous number of small parts, which makes assembling it quite labor intensive

I like the finished products, but getting there is time consuming. 

Another weekend's free time eaten up. More next posting!