Aquilifer added to the 15mm Renaissance Manufacturers listing

Italian manufacturer Aquilifer have now been added to the 15mm Renaissance listing, with their range of 12 Scottish and Highlander figure packs.

They now have their own website, which has also been added to their listing in the Ancients 15mm directory

Tiger Tanks!

Remember those two BergPanzer Tiger 1's that came "free" with the collectable magazines which I got in order to get 2 Strykers for Force on Force? Well, a bit of spraying and painting later, and adding in a couple of barrels and some filler and here they are:

Here is the front turret plate, rather poorly "drilled" out by removing the plate, drilling a small hole in the middle of the (blank) plate and widening it out by spinning a craft knife round in the hole. This allows the metal gun barrel I bought to be glued into the hole.

The tracks - an Airfix-style loop of black soft rubber - are removed, which ended up breaking the drive and guide sprockets at each end of the wheel assembly, needing them to be glued back on. This is a pain, but you need the tracks off to spray them in Dunkelgelb, or to be precise, Army Painter Desert Yellow.

The nude Tigers are now ready for spraying and painting. I really should have filled the gap in the front plate, but I didn't get round to it, sorry...

The two finished articles, with the base yellow, the green and the brown all done in paints from Army Painter (Leather Brown, Desert Yellow and Army Green).  The green looks a little light to me, but German WW2 tank cammo was a real lottery with different paint batches, field-applied paints and different mixers (from water to diesel), so this is probably as accurate as anything else...

Washed in a diuted mixture of a few brown paints and distilled water, then drybrushed

The details of cables and the like are picked out in separate paint colours. I did them deliberately to stand out more, to help highlight the model

The numbers are 15mm scale FOW numerals from the Afrika Corps set of decals that came with the GREIF / Rommel vehicle. Not a bad job for a "free" model I reckon...

PSC 15mm British Infantry

I've been painting some of these chaps, and very nice they are too. This time it's an experiment in painting on the sprue. The base colour is an undercoat of Khaki spray from Halfords, which turned out very pale, so I added two washes of Windsor and Newton Peat Brown ink, and then did the straps in Faded Khaki from Coat d'Arms. 

Here they are with a final coat of ArmyPainter Strong Tone, prior to matt varnishing

The bases need some grass to hide the figures bases I think

Plastic Soldier Company US infantry - finished !

The full walk-through and pictures of the finished troops now posted on the site;

Military Vehicles Magazine - finally got one !

I've been trying to find a newsagent with copies of the first few issues of the "partwork" magazine Military Vehicles for the last few weeks, and finally wandered into a branch of WH Smiths to see the 3rd issue on sale for £5.99

The magazine itself is of course a bit pants - Wikipedia and 2 minutes on Google could come up with more infor on the Stryker and Bergpanzer Tiger than the magazine contains, but getting two 1/72nd models for £5.99 can't be sniffed at, can it?

The main reason for buying it was to pick up a couple of Strykers for use in Force on Force, which I'll work on soon by weathering the rather shiny plastic kit seen here - but that leaves me with the challenge of what to do with two WW2 German armoured recovery vehicles of a type which may well not even have existed...

Having had a quick look at the vehicle itself, its soon obvious that the model is essentially a bog-standard Tiger I with the gun taken off and a winch and hook arrangement grafted onto what is otherwise a standard model - even the gun mantlet is still in place. It will need a bit of filling anyway - as you can see from this photo it may have been modelled on the Airfix Tiger I, as the hull front doesn't really join up with the underside of this one either!

So, rather than either waste the kits, or spend weeks trying to devise a credible scenario for Chain of Command in which the Germans are needing to rescue one recovery vehicle with another, I had a much simpler idea. Buy a couple of barrels and do a bit of quick conversion to turn the recovery vehicles into real ones! Luckily eBay has a couple of sellers of 1/72nd Tiger Barrels - these are machined metal barrels which modellers use to upgrade plastic kits to more accurate and robust versions (especially with the smoke diffuser end thingy on the barrel)

If you've picked up one of these magazines, maybe this is an idea to convert the Bergpanzer to a real Tiger rather than flood eBay with them! The barrels are onsale in the UK from Story Models and in the US from Small Military Models and More