Pikachu!

My daughter wanted to show off her work on my blog. Sculped from polymer clay and then painted.

SPG-9 Kopye

I received my M-103 tanks, and there will be a glorious posting on them once I paint them. The humidity has been very high the lately, so I don't want to spray anything, especially my preciouses!

Looking over my orders of battle for my fictional campaign, I realized that the Northern Chalupistan army called for a number of companies to be armed with the SPG-9 Kopye recoilless gun. It was lightweight and replaced the B-10 recoilless rifle. It is still used today by a number of former Soviet block countries, though probably not as a front line anti-tank weapon.

By Kolpag - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33909865

GHQ used to make one back in the 70s or 80s. Recoilless rifles are few and far between in microscale. Scotia-Grendel makes some generic ones, but I thought I'd try my hand to make it look closer to the real thing. Here is the result:

SPG-9 with GHQ Soviet RPG-7 gunner for scale.

This is the first completed one. It is made out of styrene round rods of various diameters. the main barrel is a 1mm rod, which is way too big. Its diameter is larger than the barrels of my M-103's 120mm guns! Unfortunately, the next size down that I have looks too thin. If I were to remake them, I'd go with maybe a 0.8mm rod for the main part of the barrel. One thing that I can pat myself on the back is that it is pretty much to scale length-wise.

Most of the gun is glued together with liquid modelling cement, which I am liking less and less. The glue is supposed to weld the pieces together, but on a couple of them, the conical breeches fell off. I glued them back on with superglue and hopefully they will stick. I do have rangefinders to glue on, but if I use figures like the one in the above picture, there is no reason to put them on.

Getting the height of the tripod is tricky. This one makes the gun too high off the ground. In pictures, it is much lower. Pictures show the gunner crouching down even more than the GHQ figure is in the above picture.

I have four more guns. Two will get tripods and be mounted on bases as support weapons. The trick is to find figures that look like they are firing the gun. The other two will be put onto technicals where I will glue on the rangefinders.

Caribou Quick Fix

After butchering the bottom of the C-7 Caribou, I went with plan A and drilled a hole in the back to accommodate a peg. The nail I used turned out to be a little smaller than the depth of the hole, so the nose still sticks up a little. The nail is temporary. I hope to find a clear acrylic rod of the same diameter and use that.

I'll attach a rare earth magnet to the bottom of the plan before priming and painting.

Purchases From Chicagoland

Last week, I took the kiddies to visit my family in Chicago. My family actually lives in the suburbs, but unless you are from around there, you probably won't know the names of the towns. Anyway, I made my semi-annual trip to Games Plus Hobbies. I usually spend about an hour or so, wandering around, basking in the glow of all things gaming. I had not planned to but I ended up buying three items.

First, Team Yankee rules by Battlefront.

A lot of folks have been playing them using 6mm. I read through them a couple of time. I'm not exactly sure how they differ from Flames of War, but they seem easier to understand. I recall there were some things in FOW that I just didn't get, like artillery. Made more sense to me now. They only problem right now is that the weapon stats are for a few AFVs and such that were in NATO or Warsaw Pact. Hopefully they will expand it beyond that.

Next up is a game called Munchkin by Steve Jackson Games.

I've seen this for awhile. I thought I'd buy it and my daughter, nephews, and I could play it one night. That never happened.  Reading over the rules, it looks like a fun game, but it's hard to say until it gets played.

Finally, I bought some micro-scale banana trees. I don't remember who makes them.

They don't exactly look like banana trees, but they will due as some sort of palm tree. Looking at them, I can see how they were made. The makers of these took wire that is used to hang pictures up. It consists of a number of very fine wires that are twisted around each other like a cable. they unravelled them at one end at glued flocking to them. It seems, too, that they didn't bother spraying them with any sort of PVA glue to hold down the flock. There is flock coming off of some of the branches and the bases. Also, their bases are rather thick. I'll use them, but I'm not sure if they were worth the $12 I paid.

Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!

Now I can now die a happy man! At last, after years of waiting, GHQ has FINALLY put out the US M103 heavy tank.

Of all the microarmor on my wish list, the highest on that list is the M103. Yes, both Heroics & Ros and Scotia have a model of the M103, but I've never been happy with them.

Why? OK, I'll tell you (cue flashback music)....
In my youth, my chums and I spent hours having epic battles involving our HO/OO Airfix miniatures and Roco minitanks. I had six or seven Roco tanks, but my favorites were like the Holy Trinity: the M47 medium tank, the M42 Duster AA, and the M103 heavy tank. They bore the brunt of many battles on the side of the forces of good. Something about the lines of both the M47 and the M103 that I really like. It's like the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. It had a lot of issues as a fighter, but it's a beautiful-looking bird.

Both GHQ and C-in-C has had the M47 out for a while. GHQ came out with the M42 about four years ago. But, no one made the M103 in 1/285 scale. As I said, I have not been really happy with either the Heroics & Ros and the Scotia versions, even though I own them. C-in-C has not put out much in the way of AFVs in a long time, so I had low expectations of them putting one out. GHQ, on the other hand, is constantly pouring out new models. What ticked me off was that they were often things like trailers. I'm sorry, but while trailers are important, they will contribute little to my games.

In my fictional campaign, Southern Chalupastan fields two battalions of the M103. There is even the vaunted Roco Division. It consists of a battalion of M103s, a battalion of M47s and uses the M42 Duster for AA support. When the M103 take the field, the North had better watch out!

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.

Aircraft Issues

I recently discovered Amphibmods. Its a small company that makes microscale landing craft, riverine combat ships, and aircraft. They have a small, but useful selection of military transport planes that are in metal and very inexpensive! I got some C-7 Caribou. The Caribou are solid metal. I decided to build them with the landing gear down. Unfortunately, It finished up looking like this:

Because it is solid, I couldn't put any weights in its nose. There were several suggestions from the 6mm Facebook group to dig out the metal at the tail end and fill the spaces with putty. I think I would have a major and messy job on my hands if I did that. It is not a top priority to finish it, so I will dwell on this problem while working on other things.