Armored Car Conversion

I seem to have bad luck with C-in-C's French ERC-90 Sagaie armored cars (F-10). An earlier order of Sagaies that I got had the turretless mystery tank in it that turned out to be a WWII Japanese tank. A more recent order had a Sagaie model that was missing most of its 90 mm gun. I thought about replacing the nub of a gun with a piece of wire or pin. But, then I thought, "lets get creative." The result is this:





Its is a command vehicle (as if you couldn't tell!). I left off the turret and built a superstructure out of cardboard. I then cut and shaped it to angle the sides. The angles looked a little better before I tried smoothing them down with fine sand paper. This rounded off the angles of the superstructure more than I wanted. The window covers and hatches were also made of thin cardstock. Next time I do something like this, I will use styrene plastic.

Here is a shot of an unconverted ERC-90:

The dude manning the light machinegun is from GHQ's seated WWII US armored infantry pack (US53). Please pretend that the big pipe sticking out the back is a radio antenna....please!

The New House on the Block

It took me awhile, but I finally finished this building:



It is a little more Mediterranean in style than my previous buildings. I got the inspiration from some "pretty pictures" site on the web. I am not crazy about the balcony on the third floor and I should have added a little more height to the top floor.

I have several building projects in mind, including a fuel storage facility, a market area, and something along the lines of Dr. Seuss!

A COIN For Your Thoughts

Scotia Grendel (http://www.scotiagrendel.com) makes several interesting minis of weapons systems that never got beyond prototype stage. For example, they have a 1/300 model of the Brazilian Osorio MBT (BZ3). A tank for export that no one bought. It doesn't even seem like the Brazilian Army used it. Another example is the Cavalier Mustang III from their Collectair line (CAUM10). It was to be sold to nations for COIN operations, but went nowhere. Here is one I painted up for Southern Chalupastan:



I added the spinning propeller by cutting out a piece of clear plastic. The rocket pods were made by cutting down a toothpick and rounding off the tip. I then painted on where the rocket tubes exited. There was no way I could carve them out.

Pre-Prototype of a Car in 1/300

Here is my first attempt at a scratch-built car in 1/300 scale:



Its supposed to be a Volvo C30. I make a chassis out of thin cardstock and then used a mixture of FIMO an Sculpy III polymer clay for the body and wheels. Not great, but ya gotta start somewhere, right?