The last few Arrowhead 12mm WW2 vehicles

With Arrowhead selling up (and hopefully finding a buyer for the business), I recently picked up a small set of Late War British vehicles to round out my army for BKC.

It's two Cromwells (giving me a troop of 3 in total) and a fabulous scene-stealing Staghound

 The unit markings are a bit of everything really, just to get some colour onto the models - which are really great little kits. Vallejo Bronze Green is the go-to colour (of course) 

Fingers crossed someone picks the range up and carries on with it.

Teeny-tiny lazy soldiers... 6mm ultra-moderns

Before the Lockdown there were these things called "Wargaming trade shows", where you could see stuff, talk to the people selling it and then give them actual cash to buy it - imagine that? And all of it was much more friendly that this internet + delivery malarkey we're all playing at now. 

At the penultimate show I went to, PAW back in January, I picked up some modern British Mainforce infantry from Colonel Bills second hand figures display, which I've been meaning to paint up to go with the refurbished middle eastern ultra-moderns that I've been gradually working through over the past few months - and as they are dead easy to do, here they are:

The paler-cammo-painted troops here are half of a British Modern Mechanised Infantry set. If you don't know Mainforce's range, each individual base is a single piece of metal with the men moulded onto it in a prone position.

This concept is one I find is really great, as they don't break or bend like standing soldiers, they are easier to store, and anyway most modern infantry probably spend a lot of time lying down already!

The painting is as easy as you can imagine - spray the whole lot with Bleached Bone first, then ink the lot with a dark wash, let it dry and then 'damp-brush' the infantrymen's bodies.

To finish them off from there I do flesh coloured blobs for hands and faces, and pick out the weapons and boots in fairly bold colours (this time I used dark brown for boots, black guns, and green for the support weapons) and away you go

I painted up the other half of the pack as "enemy", with a darker brown for uniforms and black boots as well - giving them all green helmets too for that ex-soviet militia army look.

A spot of static grass completes the lot.

I glued all of the metal pieces onto magnabase before spraying them - this means they can be magnetized onto a ferrous sheet for safer storage, and adds more depth to each base making them a bit easier to pick up off the table as well

The pack I bought has eighteen infantry bases, five Command, eight Milan anti-tank missiles, seven light mortars, nine GPMGs and two Javelins.

But at this scale they do all kinda just look like blokes lying down with guns and stuff to be honest, so for my purposes splitting the pack in half and creating two sets of troops for opposing sides is absoluely fine.

Splitting the pack gives each side 10+ infantry bases and a load of support weapons

My previous experienmce with these was a few years ago when I probably used the same set to create Brits in DPM cammo for the European theatre. They are also still all online here

1/300th Modern Desert War Brits on eBay

With time at home to sort stuff like this out, I'm now selling on eBay a huge, fully painted, mostly Heroics & Ros 1/300th micro-armour British Gulf War and earlier (or, as it has Challengers AND Chieftains, something that could also be used for Omani's, or even as part of an Iranian armoured force?) battlegroup.

As well as the tanks and APC's there are also a host of options including air support from a Tornado, as well as some fairly retro mid 70's and 80's support vehicles.

eBay Link to auction

This is all just part of an even larger collection which I had when much younger and is now being downsized to more manageable proportions.

The auction ends on April 5th at 8pm BST, the models are almost all Heroics & Ros but there may be a couple of other makes in there as well for some of the vehicle types

The set includes:

• 13 Challengers
• 12 Warrior IFV's 
• 20 Chieftains
• 10 Saracen 6-wheeler APC's
• 8 Saxon 4-wheeler APC's
• 15 Scorpion/Scimitar light tanks 
• 4 Striker (Swingfire?) ATGW variants on the Scorpion chassis
• 3 Ferret recce vehicles 
• 5 Long wheelbase and 5 normal Land Rovers 
• A command set of 2 FV432's and a command vehicle variant 
• 1 Tornado, which is painted with Saudi roundels (so it only needs a couple of blobs of red white and blue to restore to RAF service if you so wish)

This lot would set you back just over £50 in unpainted lead from Heroics and Ros if you wanted to buy them today (tanks are 75p, other vehicles are 65p each according to their website), but these guys are good to go right now straight out of the packet - or with a simple and very quick wash with something from Army Painter and perhaps a drag over with a drybrush they'll really "pop" even more.

The models are packed and ready to be despatched promptly on receipt of payment. I have worked out that I can print postage from Royal Mail online and drop them in a post box at the end of my road as part of my one legally-permitted self-isolating walk of the day, so no worries about any delays in getting them to you either

10% of the final price will go to SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity supportiung ex-service personnel and their families across the UK.

Lockdown! The Madaxeman.com Podcast returns..

With much of the gaming world in lockdown it's become impossible to go to the pub and talk rubbish about wargaming - so why not listen to 5 random blokes talking rubbish about wargaming for an hour or so while you're doing some painting? 

"It's basically a Poundshop Top Gear, but with more dice and less casual racism"
(The Daily Mail)

In this first of many (probably) Lockdown Special Podcasts the team wrestle with audio quality across a variety of supposedly professional-grade audio conferencing apps, and chat tosh about a number of barely related topics.

"Convinced me my wife was right and I did actually need to go and re-grout the shower"
(Angus Deayton, former TV celebrity)

Subjects covered include Forged in Battle's Kickstarters, the pseudo-wargame Rommel, the state of the Flames of War market, Essex, Xyston and Museum miniatures latest releases, Herve Caille's Bataille Empire rules, their experiences of the last overseas conventions before we were all confined to barracks and even whether World of Tanks might be worth us all re-installing?


"Made me wonder if perhaps Trump is onto something, and it might be best to re-open the country at Easter"
(Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US Freshman Senator)

Listen or download here via this link

More tiny tanks...

With too many photos to post in one go, here are the rest of the 1/300th scale moderns - none of which still thankfully smell of Dettol either!

This lot is mostly Arab armies - a mix of T72, T64 and T55s 

The tanks are mostly on 40x20 bases, with other AFVs on 30x20 and 20x20 for the small ones 

I'm not sure if this Desert MERDC scheme was actually used, but it does look cool! 

I seem to have a full set of M60s, AAV7's, M1's, Bradleys and other toys - probably far too many to actually use in CWC!

The M60's have had the most work done in terms of removing the old paint and metal rot

There were also some random French and other vehicles, apparently from a French Recce force that there is no real list for in CWC at the moment as it may be a bit too modern,

The T55's are I think rather ropey Skytrex models. For all of the tanks they are Army Painter desert sand spray, with Army Painter diluted soft tone wash on the upper surfaces and Dark Tone on the wheels and tracks.  

My attempts to paint the tracks themselves are a partial; success (aka a bit rubbish) but at tabletop distances they are OK (honestly...)

I suspect everyone in the world owns 30+ of these H&R models...

T64 eport version - again I think Skytrex

A full collection of AFVs, as well as PT76's round out the collection

Refurbished 1/300th scale tanks

A couple of months ago I was gifted a huge collection of 1/300th scale tanks by brother, most of which I'd actually painted and some of which I'd owned way back when we were both still at school.

Other than the sheer amazement as to just how dammned many of the blighters there actually were (and being mind-boggled that we managed to even play a single turn either of the old WRG modern rules, or the even more complex and marker-tastic Battlegroup moderns with quite so many AFVs on table..), it was also a challenge to see how easily it would be to upgrade some of them to a full set of CWC Middle Eastern forces.

None of them were based, and more concerningly a significant proportion of them were suffering from some sort of evil metal rot/fungal plague as well.  The internet provided some help, and I ended up buying a large amount of Dettol to act as a paint stripper - and smelling out the house in the process with a rather different, more medicinal small than I usually do (with paint...)!

The end result is four full A4 trays worth of based 1/300th AFVs, and at least as much again that will go for sale to clubmates or on eBay in the new year.

Here are pictures of the Israelis, and also some of the Brits as well:

Israelis and some extras for other forces in the storage tray. This is an A4 plastic paper storage box from Paperchase lined with steel paper for the magnabased AFVs top stick to. 

A layer of bubble wrap will sit on top of them and hold them all in place when the lid is shut, allowing them to be stored upright alongside the rules in a bookcase. 

British command stand

Israeli command stands

British Challenger AFV's, command and Warrior IFV's. 

The basing is magnabased card, with sand glued onto it, stained with Rustins woodstain and then drybrished in pale grey and the old standard of Bleached Bone 

The metal rot!  I guess I could have just left them as-is and used them for FWC ...

Dettol, an old toothbrish head, and a bad smell ... 

M60's post-soaking

 

British recce units

Skytrex (I think) Centurions

Set of three Israeli tanks

The Russian-supplied kit, and a USMC desert-MERDC battlegroup will be posted soon..

The War Memorial of Korea Museum

I was recently fortunate enough to go to the very impressive Korean War Memorial Museum in Seoul, which has an unsurprisingly large amount of Korean War and post-war Korean stuff in it, as well as some pretty solid ancient history, with uniforms, artifacts, armour and some impressive paintings of the Goguryeo and Joseon eras.

These are the nearly 100 pictures I managed to take before my phone ran out of juice, starting in the grounds with Korean War and post war aircraft and AFVs, then moving inside to the uniforms and kit from the Goguryeo Korean and Joseon Korean Dynasties era.

Some of the Ancient photos can be clicked to give you a marginally bigger but higher resolution original image.

Here's just a taste of whats in store...