New Life for an Old Mini

 When I first jumped into 15mm medievals and fantasy, there was not a lot out there. One of the companies I discovered was Thistle & Rose Miniatures. I ordered some Norman knights to see what they looked like. This was before the days of online ordering. I painted them up but I don't know what happened to most of them. As I was cleaning my workbench, I found this guy. His horse was a mess. The legs had broken off. The rider was still intact. On a whim, I decided to see if he was compatible with any horses of other manufacturers. Lo and behold he was! He now rides an Essex unarmored horse.

I rarely, if ever, repaint any of my figures; only to touch them up if their paint is chipped. Keeping them the way they were originally painted is my way of keeping a record of my painting styles and progress over the years. So, while he has a more "advanced" painted horse, he is at the level of painting going back to the mid 90s. 

Update: Life Goes On

 Its been forever, or at least it seems like forever since my last post. The culprit: my house. We've been thinking about this for years, but finally, we are remodeling our main floor of our house....pretty much ourselves! The floor is the first, and probably main thing that is being done. 

This is a job for a younger man. Even wearing knee pads, its killing me. My wife is helping a lot, though her constant obsessing with the smallest measurements is not really helping. The other issue is that its only now that we are putting down the floor. The last three weeks have been nothing but prep work. The people who built this house were idiots. But hey, I got to use a nail gun! And, my Dremel tool has been put to good use cutting the flooring. I also learned to take all YouTube home-improvement videos with a huge grain of salt. Nothing every goes as smoothly as they show (see above comment about the idiots who built this house). 

So this is the state of things for now.  Laundry, washing dishes, my teaching, all that other stuff have gone out the window. I'm lucky that my kids get fed. My hobby daydreams are the closest I get to things for now. One other thing I want to mention. I am a lucky man to know people who can lend some time, even if its just for an hour or two to help. Both my boss and a friend from church who is a retired software engineer who seems to know a lot about this stuff and has almost all the tools I need have been helping a lot. Without them, I'd be swimming in quicksand.

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.

More Federal Republic of Gambusia AFVs

I could have sworn I posted these, but I guess I have not.

The Federal Republic of Gambusia (FRG) has an infantry battalion of made up of more modern APCs than old Saracens. It consists of Canadian 6-wheeled Cougars and Grizzlies. The Cougars have been modified into fire support vehicles and ATGM carriers.

I used the turret from a Scotia-Grendel Stingray light tank for the FSV. The ATGM were scratch built. Unfortunately, they all came out a little different on those. This is the best of them. These were my first conversions that I made when I plunged into modern gaming and I am quite happy with them.

6mm Head Swap

I've made lots of head swaps for 15mm medievals, but this was both 1000X more tedious and felt weird. One of the riders of the MT-LB was missing his head, but I didn't notice it until I primed the model. So, I cut off the head of another mini and glued it on.

Before:

Can you spot the new head?

After:

Not perfect, but good enough at this scale. I just hope it stays on. Another piece of hardware for the Gambusian rebels!

Another COIN Aircraft and a RPG

It's been a long hiatus of doing much hobby stuff, but finals are now over. Today was commencement. Fortunately, I had lunch right after the ceremony with good friend and colleague. Usually, I am rather melancholy for a few days after commencement, but the lunch was a pick-me-up.

Anyway, I've started back into working on stuff. First off, a COIN aircraft for the Federal Republic of Gambusia:

It is a Hawker Sea Fury from MSD Games. They have some really nice models that are probably a little better than Heroics & Ros. 

Like the Kiowa Warriors, this plane painted green brown but now with Middlestone camo. The roundel looks like a british one, but the center is actually green. The rockets are modified C-in-C Sidewinder missiles. I have another Sea Fury that I plan to put more modern rocket pods on. I don't usually do anything with the panel lines, but this time I did and it turned out well. 

Onto the RPG gunner.....

I noticed that my rebel units are pretty skimpy in the basic riflemen category, so I've started beefing up those. I seem to get obsessed with various weapons and this time is the Soviet/Russian RPG-29:

Source: modernfirearms.net

Pretty simple: a tube. But it's a tube that can really punch major holes in modern armor. According to Wikipedia, it has taken out MBTs such as the M1 Abrams and the Challenger 2. It's secret is that it has a tandem warhead that can defeat ERA or modern composite armor. An avid converter who posts on one of the microarmor groups on Facebook made one out of a RPG-7 gunner, so I thought I could too.Here are some pre- and post-painted pictures:

I used a RPG-7 gunner from GHQ's Bush Warrior pack. First, I tried cutting off the entire RPG off, but the gunner's head came off along with it. Then I cut off the front and back ends on another victim. I then glued two pieces of an 8 mm styrene rod. Hopefully, it won't bread off. I plan to mount this guy in the center of the base with two other figures on either side of him. That should protect him. The back part of the barrel is a little warped, but overall it looks pretty good. I think I got it pretty close to the proper length scale-wise. 

I don't really have any sort of story as to how Gambusian rebels got a hold of one. Northern Chalupistan doesn't even have them in their arsenal. It will be a one-off weapon, so probably not a battlefield game changer. 

When I get closer to completing the rebels, I will post a group portrait. 

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.

The Mighty M103 Heavy Tank!

I finally got a day where the humidity seemed OK for spraying my GHQ M103 heavy tanks. I used Testor's Olive Drab, which was a little darker than what I wanted, so I highlighted them with Vallejo Olive Green. I tested out a black wash on one of the tanks, but it look too dark. For now I will leave them as is. Three I made into company command tanks.

The battalion

 

Three command tanks:

I designate my command AFVs by at least sticking on an antenna. I will also stick in a commander if I feel ambitious. I have tried different methods of antenna making with varying satisfaction. This time I used a method by the guy who makes GameCraft Miniatures. I think it has worked the best so far, BUT the brush hairs can bend very easily, and don't spring back. 

Commander 1: side view

Commander 1: turret turned

Commander 2

Commander 3

GHQ provided these tanks with a pintle-mounted 50 cal machine gun. This is great, but it made it difficult to sick in a tank commander. The commanders themselves are an example of scale creep. Yes, it even happens at the micro level. Commanders 1 and 3 are from GHQ's American WWII artillery and vehicle crew packs. They are much thinner than commander 2. Even so, I had to cut off and extend the machine gun on commander 1 to allow him to man the gun. Commander 2 is from their more recent 3rd World Regulars infantry pack. He was much beefier compared to the other two and it took more work to fit him in the commander's copula. I should have sniped off his binocular case to accommodate the gun.  As a result, the machine gun is stuck in that weird down position. 

A Break From Terrain

I am getting pretty close to the amount of terrain I need for the first battle of my campaign. About the only thing left is some fields of crops, need to check that I have enough paved road segments, and a truck stop, which is the biggie.

As I am figuring out how to make the truck stop, I decided to work on some odds and ends. First up, solving the problem of the tipping Caribou transport plane. I should have gone with my gut and made a clear, removable peg that served to hold the back end up, but NO-O-O!!! I had to try to cut out the back part of the plane to make it lighter. The result: EPIC FAIL!

Well, that looks like crap.

I drilled a bunch of holes, one of which pushed the sides of the plane out. After three holes, I decided this wasn't going to work. I globbed some nasty model putty in hopes that it will harden well. I still have to put at least one more layer on in the morning. I am hoping that the putty will be hard enough to drill a small hole for a peg.

After that waste of about one and a half hours, I wanted to feel like I accomplished something this evening, so I went back to a project I started in 2009, but never finished. This was improving the hold of GHQ's turrets to the hulls on their Chinese Type 63 tanks. This was more of a pertinent project because the Type 63s will be used in the first battle. Back in 2009, I used rare-earth magnets, but I was burnt out from just making big holes with large pin vises. Instead I used some really tiny nails to do the job.

Tiny nail resting comfortably on a piece of carpet

I only had to drill small holes in the bottom of the turret and on the body of the tank. The flat head of the nail will hold the turret in place:

It was a little work to make sure that the nail was reasonably perpendicular to the bottom plane of the turret, but they all seemed to work out. The turrets rotate smoothly.

The left and center have the nails for pins, the right has a magnet

This was a lot less work than the magnets. My only concern is that someone might try yanking off the turret, which may pull nail out. Time will tell. More importantly, it soothed my soul after the Caribou disaster.

New Toys for Conversion Project

There have been a bunch of groups that have been popping up on Facebook in the last few years. They are becoming a popular alternative to Yahoo! Groups. Keith Armstrong of ArmiesArmy showed plans to make a MN-116 Norwegian light tank in 1/100 (15mm). When I first saw the designation MN-116, I thought it was some sort of upgrade of the M113 APC. Nope, its an up-gunned M24 Chaffee light tank. They replaced the old 75mm gun with a French 90 mm low pressure gun, the same gun found on many armored cars. They also replaced the original engine with that of a M113, which might be the reason for the designation. Cool! A tiny tank with a big gun on it...gotta make a 1/285 version! Here is some drawings of it:

Source: http://www.the-blueprints.com

How does it relate to my gaming? In my back history, Southern Chalupastan received a number of surplus WW2 weapons in the late 50s/early 60s . As a result, their armored units were made up of Shermans and Chaffees. These took a beating during the First Chalupastan War, but still were enough of the Chaffees to constitute a battalion. This battalion was relegated to training and to act as an aggressor force for war exercises.  After the war, there was a need to rearm and upgrade their forces. Despite their defeat, the South still viewed Northern Chalupistan as a major treat. What caught my eye and made my decision to include an upgraded Chaffee to my campaign was that Keith stated that it was a relatively cheap upgrade. Presently, the South has some more modern light tanks like the M41 Walker Bulldog  and the Textron Stingray, but these are in small numbers and are relegated to recon companies. 

Many of the TO&Es of my Gambusian armies have weapons only on paper. One of which is this training battalion that I figured would never see combat. Now, if they get upgraded, then they could go to war. I envision brave cadets charging T-55s and T-72s with their pint-sized tanks! 

Today, my order came in from CinC:

Despite the bendy gun barrel, its a very nice model

 I got 20 tanks. 15 will be converted whereas the other five will be left alone to be used for any WW2 games. I will try to finish my river and forest hexes first, before the conversion work on these guys start. Besides, I need to figure out what I am going to use for the conversion.

M 113 Upgrades

 On the eve of the Second Chalupistan War, Southern Chalupastan wanted to upgrade the firepower of their M 113 APCs so that they were more like an infantry fighting vehicle. They added 20 mm Rheinmetall MK 20 Rh 202 automatic cannon turret; the same as is found on the Marder 1 IVF. Time ran out long before many could be converted, but enough were to be distributed to at least one platoon per company of the 2nd Royal Guard Dragoons and the 2nd Armored Infantry battalion.

 

Additionally, some M 113s had a remote weapon station installed with a 7.62mm MG.

The M 113s and the Marder 20mm turrets were from C in C. C-in-C's M 113 model is nice as it has a gunner manning the 50 cal MG. I can always use them for something else. I am not sure what to do with the Marder bodies. They also come with a rear mounted, remote controlled MG. Unlike GHQ, which pretty much gives you five of everything, C in C varies the number of vehicles per pack. There was one more M 113 than there were Marders. I had a spare remote weapons station from a pack of Heroics & Ros Australian Bushmasters, so I stuck that on the remaining M 113.

Scratch-built Tiny Machine Gun

The problem with building technicals in micro-armor scale is that there are not a lot of free-standing weapons to use and what there is, you don't necessarily want to use for a technical. For example, I see lot of pictures of technicals armed with the Russian ZPU-4 quad 14.5 mm AA gun. However, there are only two companies that make them, GHQ and Scotia. GHQ's aren't cheap, and to paraphrase another microarmor blog, they are very difficult put together. I have a pack of them, but have yet to put them together for fear of screwing up a $10 model. It was hard enough putting together their beautiful Ontos model with its four recoilless rifles; this challenge looks way too daunting. Scotia's model, on the other hand, is easy to put together, but bit too large. I can see why they made it that way in order to cast it, and it looks passable when on the ground, but I can't see it on the back of a pickup truck:

Scotia ZPU-4 with Northern Chalupistan crew

Included in the GHQ's pack of Toyota pickup trucks were some pedestal-mounted, 7.62mm M-60 looking light machine guns (GHQ Stock # TW6). As an experiment, I decided to make my own light machine gun to attach to one of the little open-topped, Trabant Kuebels that I got from Shapeways.

Step 1: Cut out Gun and Glue to Pedestal
Examining the GHQ guns (sorry, I forgot to take a good picture of them, but you can see them peeking out at the top of the picture below), I could imagine that they were made from very thin sheet styrene.
Using a very thin sheet of styene, I cut out my gun. Unlike the GHQ gun, there is no grip on mine. I couldn't imagine how they were able to either cut that out, or glue one on.  The stock on my gun looks really large, too, but I think my gun looks overall passable:

Gun cut out with car next to it.

Close up of gun with pedestal glued on it.

I then took a 2mm styrene rod at glued it onto the gun with a combo of styrene welding cement and superglue gel. I didn't want to trim it to size until I was ready to put it on the car.

Step 2: Adding a Magazine
I could have left it at that, but I couldn't be outdone by GHQ's fantastic work. With nerves of steel, I then glued a tiny block of styrene onto the gun to make the magazine:

Gun with ammo box attached

Its probably out of scale, but it will do.

Step 3: Glue the Gun to the Car
What could be easier? Unfortunately, it was not the case. Apparently, the material that these 3D printed cars are made out of seems superficially rubbery, but in reality, its brittle. Or, it could be that the primer I used made the material brittle...no matter. I foolishly thought that I could drill a shallow, little hole behind the two front seats to fit the machinegun in by using my X-Acto knife. This is what resulted:

And this:

The two halves didn't fit back together well. In addition to the two halves, there were a bunch of little shards.  So, there is no point in fixing it. I will probably use it as a bombed out car. I have not yet decided what to use the machine gun for. I have some Mamba South African APC's that could use some fire power, or I might give the Trabant Kuebel another try. I probably will give another go at making light machine guns. I doubt they will look uniform, but I think that with practice, I can make enough to equip more vehicles.

Boat Comparisons

I am in the process of cleaning my workbench. Its gotten to the point where I work off of about a 3 inch space in front of me. I want to get it clean before half of my family returns from China. Then, I will have no time to do it as the Little Boss Man will demand much of my time.

What does this have to do with boats? While cleaning, I found three in various stages of completion, so I thought I'd take a picture of them before I put them somewhere out of harms way. All three are 6mm-1/285 scale and will be used for my Gambusia campaign.

Top: In-shore patrol craft; Middle: Soviet BK1125 River monitor; Bottom: SOC-R assault craft

The patrol boat looks enormous next to the other two. However, the SOC-R is just larger than the rubber boat that is on the back of the patrol boat, so it seems to be in scale.  When I stick a 6mm infantry man onto the patrol boat, he seems to fit right. The Soviet river monitor is the one that seems out of scale. I am pretty sure I did the math correctly when I did the scaling. It could be that those Soviet river monitors were just not that big.

The inshore patrol boat was featured in an early series of postings, so I am not going to comment on that.  I decided that the monitor needed some updating. I cut off the machine gun turrets that were in front of the 76mm tank turret, on top of the pilot house, and aft. The detail on them wasn't all that much. I added a tripod mast with two radar mounts. Where the pilot house machine gun turret was, I added an electro-opitic system. In the rear, I scratch built a M2-3 turret with two 25mm AA guns. It didn't turn out very well as it is larger than it should be. Originally, I tried to make it out of paper, but that ended in complete failure. The guns are too thick as well. These turrets, common on smaller Soviet ships from the 50s to the 70s, were very small. Only a single gunner could fit in them. I am thinking about adding railings around the monitor, but it depends how motivated I am.

The SOC-R assault craft is made by P.T. Dockyard. I have been eying the various small ships that he has to offer for quite awhile. In addition to some 1/700 missile boats, I got two SOC-R river assault crafts that are 1/300 scale. They are cast in white resin. It was very difficult to remove the flash successfully from the guns. I had to replace the barrel of one of the forward mini-guns with a thin rod, and will have to do the same for one of the bow machine guns. I added two antennae made out of plastic filament in the back. Despite these issues, I am pretty happy with it. I will mount it onto a thin base. I modified a GHQ WWII US artilleryman to pilot the boat. The assault craft will be part of the small Southern Chalupastan river fleet unlike the large patrol boat and river monitor, which belongs to Northern Chalupistan.

Three New Technicals

This is crazy! A new post a day after the previous one! More fun & games with my new phone and its camera!

New Kids on the Block

 I painted these guys back sometime in late summer/early fall. I think these are Scotia trucks, but I am not sure. The guns are by Heroics & Ros. Previous technicals were painted a sort of khaki green, but I've decided that from now on, technicals will be civilian colors. Though you can't tell, the front truck is armed with a WW2 German quad 20mm Flakvierling 38. These are pretty small trucks, especially the white one. Its about the same size as the GMC pickup truck that H & R makes.

"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!

Sticky Turrets

GHQ's micro armor is great, but the one annoying thing about them is the pin that holds the turret to the body of the tank. They are tiny nubbins. The slightest bump on the battlefield and they fall off:

Chinese Type 63 Light Tank (GHQ RC3)

There have been a number of posts on various sites including GHQ's rare earth magnets have replaced the tiny posts. So, I thought I'd give it a try.

I used rare earth magnets from K&J Magnetics. I use these to mount my aircraft. They have a huge variety to choose from and have very good service.



I sniped off the post and then tried to drill the hole. At first I used my old trusty pin vise, but the drill bit was too large for it, so I ended up buying a whopper of a pin vise. This thing could do some serious hurt'n in the wrong hands!


I drilled a hole in the turret and then widened and deepened the hole on the body of the tank:


You need to make sure its deep enough especially on the turret so that the magnet is at least flush with the bottom of the turret, otherwise the turret will sit at an odd angle on the body. I then glued the magnets in. Make sure the polarities are opposite.


As you can see, the magnet in the turret is a little off center. But, it seems to sit OK on the body, and nothing looks odd when you turn the turret.