1/300 Conversion in About 20 Minutes

Yesterday, I made an all out cleaning assault on my pigsty of a workbench. Despite about three hours of work, I didn't get really far, plus all the dust I kicked up made my allergies a nightmare. Under the piles of junk, I found a lone, primed, Saracen APC and a ZU-23-2 23 mm autocannon with two gunners on it. It might have a carriage for it, or it might go onto another vehicle. The APC is an old Skytrex model and the autocannon belongs to H&R. Inspiration struck! So... shaving off the MG turret, pulling out the pin vise and drilling out a hole for the gun, I now have a Saracen with a ZU-23-2 AA autocannon on top.

I think it took me all of 20 minutes to complete, including waiting for the paint to dry. The thing looks incredibly top heavy and kind of silly, but I've seen some jury-rigged technicals that looked a lot more ridiculous. One more weapon to add to the Federal Republic of Gambusia's arsenal.

SA-2 Guidline SAM in 1/600

Corona virus situation has arrived in northeast Tennessee. Only one case officially reported, but things have more or less closed down. Technically, my kids and I are on spring break, but my son has been unwillingly doing online activities like Khan Academy, and I am dealing with very unhelpful IT people in trying to set up Zoom for online teaching. It will be what it will be in terms of online classes.  The upshot is that I have not had as much time as I'd like to work on the hobby. I am trying to get as much done as I can. Here is the finished product of that O8, SA-2 Guideline set.

Complete set + Radio truck

SA-2 SAM

Spoon Rest and Fan Song radars

Radio truck

Missile site

Spoon Rest is the early warning radar. The Fan Song is the guidance and tracking radar for the missiles. For the missiles and the Fan Song, I based them as if they were sitting around in dusty dirt. The Spoon Rest and the radio truck, I gave them my generic grass base as they could be used elsewhere. The radio truck didn't come with the set, but the missile site needed launch control location. It is hiding behind the Fan Song in the last picture. 

I found maps and diagrams made of permanent SAM sites. The missiles and the control radar are in earthen shelters. They are more extensive than what I've made, but I wanted to scale down the whole thing. I made the bunkers out of polymer clay and then flocked the outer side and made inside with the same modelling paste as I used for the bases of the missiles and Fang Song. 

1/600 SA-2 Missiles in Progress

I am setting up the air war aspect of the invasion of Bovatopia by Lavonia, which will kick off the campaign. I have all the aircraft painted but there are a few more additions. I just got this Russian SA-2 Guideline SAM battery from Pico Armor. It includes the Fan Song and Spoon Rest radars in addition to 6 missiles with their launchers. I had a few minutes and started working on them last night. I thought it would be a quick build and I'd be showing you the painted results. Nope. 

I wasn't sure what the problem was but I could not get the missiles to glue to their launchers. I used three types of CA glue. I don't know if it was a humidity problem (its been raining in eastern Tennessee for over a week now), old glue, or the nature of the miniatures. There was almost zero surface area to glue the missiles to their launchers, plus O8 uses this very hard metal to cast its figures. I finally got three of them to stick. Here are the results:

Left side: Fan Song radar, middle: SA-2s, right side: truck for Spoon Rest radar

The Spoon Rest radar antenna is provided as a piece of clear plastic with the antenna itself printed on. I have no clue what the function of the two different radar systems are, but it seems like the Spoon Rest is closely associated with the SA-2 missiles. Maybe it tracks the missiles to their targets, whereas the Spoon Rest detects the targets. 

Remote-Controlled Air Defense Artillery, Part 2

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!

If your remember from last time, I built an MANPADS that was a behemoth and way out of proportion. I decided to give it another go. I used the ASRAD short-ranged missile launcher that is on the German Weisel 2 as a basis:

Source: http://armoredphotos.blogspot.sg/2011/09/leflasys_02.html

This time I very consciously tried to make the weapon system as small as possible to have size exaggeration.

Here is the result:



I made the missile tubes by cutting the styrene rods and then heating up a metal base with a candle. I then lightly pushed the ends against the hot plate. It widen them to look like the ends flare out. I made about eight of them and then picked the best four.

It is still a little bigger than I wanted, but not too bad. My main beef is that the launcher tubes are too far apart from each other on either side. I think that is what makes it look large. I also built a radar vehicle. Here are some shots of them painted.

It was a nice day, so after I had sprayed them a flat clear, I thought I'd take the pictures outside. Pictures show the radar dish as gray.

The missiles are deliberately generic. They can be pretty much any MANPAD.

Federal Republic of Gambusia Armored Battalion

This past week I managed to work on some projects. The rebels got a some additional firepower in the form of a Russian M1944 100mm anti-tank gun. Sorry no pictures at this time. The Federal Republic of Gambusia now has a battalion of more modern tanks in the form of the Vickers MK III MBT. Here is a thrown-together shot of the battalion:

In reality, the anti-aircraft tanks and the tank destroyers are in separate companies, but I spaced them out for ease of photographing them.

The table of organization of the FRG is somewhat similar to that of many modern nations where the largest standing unit is the battalion. Units are combined depending on the mission. The AA company is attached. The 3rd battalion's mission is dedicated to fighting such foes as Northern Chalupistan rather than going after rebels.

Each company is represented by a different colored thermal sleeve.  The command tanks are represented by having antennae and either a tank commander or just a machine gun.

Vickers Mk III MBT

 The minis are old Skytrex ones, which are now sold by Heroics & Ros. This is their second paint job. Originally, I had a wash on them, but they looked awful. So, I repainted them with a basic gloss green  that I bought at Lowe's, and decided to skip the wash. They still look pretty glossy despite the coating of Vallejo clear flat. I would spray them with Dullcoat, but it's been awfully humid out. They are not the best models, but they are the only representatives of the Vickers Mk. III, so they will have to do.

The tank destroyer company is made up of the FV 120 Spartan MCT (Milan Compact Turret). These are Heroics & Ros models and they painted up rather nicely.

The AA battery is made up of the French AMX DCA with two 30mm AA guns. These are C in C models. I painted them up a long time ago before I really decided on a paint scheme for the FRG. These are probably among my best paint jobs for micro armor in terms of highlights and shading.

Remote-controlled Air Defence Artillery Part 1

Over at the Facebook 6mm group, it's been conversion mania. One fellow in particular has been swapping weapons and turrets with the bodies of other vehicles left and right!  Very cool stuff.

I am THIS close (holds fingertips about 2mm apart) to having a game, but I just need some time to do it. Lately, I've had little energy to do much in the evening that would take longer than maybe a half an hour. So, all of the conversion madness possessed me to make an air defence missile on small-ish vehicle. GHQ sells the Avenger ADA, which is mounted on a hummer, but that thing looks way too big and probably would be too costly for my various nations of Gambusia. So, why not give a try at one of these:

from: army-technology.com

Not interested in the vehicle itself, but rather the remote-controlled missile launcher on top:

This one consists of four French Mistral anti-aircraft missiles and a 50 cal machine gun.

There are so many permutations of weapons configurations out there, that I decided I wasn't going to duplicate this one, but rather a genetic one whose missiles could represent any MANPADS missile.

As my template, I looked at GHQ's seated MANPADS launcher for their 3rd World Regular Heavy Weapons set (TW 13). I've seen this set up on some vehicles, but that looks way out of my league to scratch build. I'm not really sure why these have seats. A remote controlled turret seems easier to make (ha-ha!). For the vehicle to mount the turret on, I have a bunch of South African infantry transport truck-like things made by Scotia-Grendel. Like the Mamba, these things are classified APCs, but to me don't really look like APC to me. This guy is smaller than the Mamba. I can't remember the name of it.

MANPADS for the lazy man in front, SA APC in back

Measuring off of the MANPADS missile pictured above, I made my missiles out of 0.8mm styrene dowels. I then glued two of each to a thin styrene sheet that separated the two:

I then glued to each missile rack a base plate that was going to be glued onto the cradle:

Two missile racks ready to be attached to the cradle.

The two racks were glued to a side plate and then joined to a 1.2mm dowel that would be the pivot bar portion of the cradle:

It was very tricky business trying to get both racks aligned. I wasn't 100% successful, but not too far off. I then mounted this into a block of styrene that I had filed out a cavity, This acted as the base of the cradle:

I glued another smaller block of styrene onto the front of cradle that was to represent the optronic system. I decided to leave off the machine gun.

Here is what it looks like from the side:

Not perfect by any means, but it looks passable on the table top. However, I AM NOT GOING TO USE IT. IT'S WAY TOO BIG!

After staring at it for a long time, and comparing it to some other models that had launchers on them, it looked portionally way too large. After consulting Wikipedia, I found that these missiles are far longer than the Mistrals, or pretty much any other MANPADS missile. So, this is why this post is Part 1. I'm going to give it another attempt and reduce the proportions. If nothing else, the goal is to get the missile racks to be no wider than the width of the vehicle's roof. I will probably use the one I made for anti-air defence on a patrol boat.

"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the Spyder to the Fly

I made and photographed these awhile back (at least two years ago), but the file got lost in my backup hard drive. I realized sometime back that Southern Chalupastan had no air defenses other than the old M42 Duster of Vietnam War fame. Surfing the web, I came upon the Israeli SPYDER mobile air defense system. It launches short- and medium-ranged surface-to-air missiles. There are two parts to the system. There is the missile launcher and the radar-tracking system; both are mounted on trucks. What I've modeled is the short range version. The medium range system has a much larger radar dish. Here's my take on the SPYDER:


Both trucks are Scotia Gendel's South African Samil 20 truck, open top (SA0012). The actual trucks that are used are built by the TATRA truck company, but these looked close enough. I cut away the sides of their beds. I fashioned the launcher out of cardstock. The missile containers are styrene plastic square rods. Sorry, I can't remember the cross sectional dimensions. I glued the launchers onto two very thin pieces of paper. In pictures, the rack that holds the containers is a very thin frame. The body of the radar truck was a slab of polymer clay that I tried to make as squared up as I could. I made this before I really started working with styrene plastic, so my materials and methods were rather crude. The radar antenna is a pin with curved piece of cardstock attached. I was going to use one of those plastic clothing tag ends, like I did on my patrol boat, but they looked much too big. Another antenna sticks off the back. I painted them olive green, the color of the Southern Chalupastan armed forces. In pictures that I've seen, the containers holding the missiles are a darker green. Painting them that color offsets them from the rest of the truck.

Not the prettiest conversions, but at 1/300, they will do fine. Hey, I don't think GHQ is going to be calling me up anytime soon to offer me a job!

Defending the Northern Skies

Ever since the "line of death" incident occurred in the summer of 2007 in which a Northern Chalupistan MiG-21 (flown by the now commander-in-chief General L. Alliruhc) shot down a Southern Northrop F5E, the North has been on a constant state of high alert. The North has deployed various AA defenses.


A SA-6 Gainful AA missiles (C in C R-86) with its Straight Flush control radar vehicle (C in C R-87)


Northern militia man a ZU-23-2 23mm AA guns (Heroics & Ros SM-48) mounted on a slightly modified Scotia RM81 Zil-131 heavy truck (at least I think it is).