31 Mar 2014

QR Miniatures Pancerni

Just realised that I'd not posted any pictures of the Pancerni after putting up some carbine-armed horse from QR of Poland.

Well, here they are (click on any photo for a larger version)


I added the rather oversized lance myself - I think the figures actually come with swords and stuff, but I seem to have mislaid some of the hands (which are separate)


Nice to see someone actually shooting a carbine from horseback





This shows them next to Old Glory Pancerni. They are a little less bulky in these shots, but on the table the difference is really not noticeable at all.


21 Mar 2014

VEPA Figures added to the 20mm Moderns Directory

I've just been contacted by a relatively new company, VEPA Figures, who do a small and growing range of 20mm Moderns - so their website has now been added to the 20mm Moderns Directory on this site.



That means you can also go to the Directory and rate their figures on a 1-5 scale, and compare them with the other 18 (yes!) metal figure ranges listed there.


6 Mar 2014

French Italian Wars Match Reports

A classic of the Renaissance era, as a French Italian Wars army takes on Ming Chinese, Scots, Caroline Imperialists and finally the Ottoman Turks in an early period FoGR competition held at Usk in January 2014,


Thrill and be amazed at what is rather embarrassingly somewhere north of 8,000 words of rather rambling prose and poorly thought out analysis all stitched together with a smattering of overly-flowery descriptive phrases plucked from the depths of dictionary corner. 

But at least some of the pictures are nice, and there isn't as much foreign-language-based swearing as in some of the recent reports either. 

20 Feb 2014

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

16 Feb 2014

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...

15 Feb 2014

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


1 Feb 2014

25 Jan 2014

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?

Bergpanzer Tiger & Stryker - Military Vehicle Magazine

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!

Military Vehicle Magazine Bergpanzer Tiger

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

19 Jan 2014

FoGR Army Lists from Usk

Lists of the French Italian Wars, Ming Chinese, Scots, Caroline Imperialists and Ottomans (morphed from the FoG:AM Ottoman army) as seen at Godendag 2014 this weekend in Usk now all posted on the FoGR Wiki



Match reports to follow...

15 Jan 2014

Japanese WW2 Snipers

I've added three snipers to my Japanese PBI army. These are Peter Pig figures, and are bedecked with various items of jungle foliage.

They are a little late for my PBI Japanese battle reports from last year...

 This isn't the most wordy blog post ever, but hey, I just finished them and wanted to share them with you all..
The pack has three variants in it, standing, kneeling and prone



They are painted in an Army Painter Leather Brown undercoat, with Coat d'Arms Japanese Uniform over the top, all topped off with Army Painter Strong Tone.

12 Jan 2014

The Heroics & Ros Rapier Unit - assembled

Having needed a Rapier battery for some time to round out my Modern British force for Cold War Commander, I finally got round to buying a Heroics & Ros Rapier unit at Warfare 2013. This had sat in my to-do pile for some time as I puzzled how to put it together....



... and so eventually I asked for help from the nice people on the BKC Forum. Clearly several other people have been through the same thought process, and so I posted some instructions on this site to help explain how to put it together. Here is the outcome:


20 Dec 2013

Oh No - WW2 in yet another scale !

Having read lots of Very Good Things online about Too Fat Lardies latest WW2 ruleset Chain of Command, I actually bought a copy at the recent Warfare show ... and then, against my better judgement but in a rather inevitable development as well I had a last-minute splurge on a whole packet of Plastic Soldier Company US infantry.

This means I now have US WW2 infantry in 10mm, 15mm and 20mm for three different rulesets at battalion, company and platoon level, but hey, who's counting...

When I got home I also dug out my old (very old...) collection of plastic WW2 figures, which have rather been confined to "no, you can't touch those soldiers, but how about playing with these ones instead...?" duties and managed to find a handful of very old Matchbox US infantry who looked to be a very similar size and stature to widen the range of poses in the unit.

So far I've assembled and based up a platoon and a bit, and painted 4 figures as a test run - here are the results (each image can be clicked to show you a bigger version).


PSC infantry, painted and unpainted. The figures were first based (on UK Government-issue washers, the small brown ones that come without the holes and cost a penny each..) and undercoated in Army Painter Leather Brown (it comes in a spray can too, which I plan to use for the complete platoon, but it wasn't worth using for this test).


The figures were painted using the guide on the back of the box, but with the closest colours I had to hand rather than the specific Vallejo paints they suggested. The trousers are just the base coat. As you can just about see here, some of the PSC figures come with separate arms which you need to glue into place. This can entail a little bit of filling of gaps along the way, but it does mean that the figure poses can carry their rifles away from their bodies.


The jacket is painted in Coat d'arms 537 Faded Khaki (sold by Black Hat) instead of the Vallejo 884 Stone Grey suggested on the box. In these photos you can also clearly see one of the odd things about these figures - the Y-shaped webbing braces on the back of each figure. I'm no rivet-counter, so I may be wrong on this but as far as I know this style was a German thing, with allied troops having more traditional over-the-shoulder parallel braces or fully crossed-over ones. It would be interesting to see if the German figures from this range have the same poses, as perhaps the bodies have been "recycled" ?!


The webbing and gaiters are in Coat d'arms 228 Buff - the box art suggested Vallejo 976 Buff, but having looked at an online comparison chart on dakkadakka this may be a bit yellow (which is what I'd thought anyway), as the far whiter "Bleached Bone" GW colour is suggested as an alternative to Vallejo Buff.


FWIW Coat d'arms Buff is a great colour for ECW-era troops, and takes an ink wash or Armypainter varnish stain really well. For the bases this is the first time I've actually tried making a "gunk" out of sand and glue, and it is a little better to then drybrush than just glued-down sand. But a lot more effort!


The standing rifleman - although this chap is doing a slightly uncomfortable looking "advance" - which is easier to spot in the next photo. This was again a figure with separate arms, however about half the figures in the pack are single piece castings. Surprisingly (given my experience with Warlord Games 28mm ECW plastics) the arms do not mix-and-match across the bodies, and there are only enough arms on the sprue to equip (or maybe "arm") all of the figures.

I would have thought it might have been possible to provide some more variety by having more arms than bodies, or some more loose kit (or separate arms!) to glue onto the figures, or even make some of the poses interchangeable - especially as it sounds like PSC do exactly this with their AFV kits, with enough bits included to produce several variants on each sprue. I did try to mix some of them up, but the arms seem pretty unforgiving in the way they match to each body, so it would involve more cutting and filling than I am prepared to do to achieve this sort of more mixed look.


The helmets were painted with an old stalwart which now has a new name - GW Castellan Green, formerly known as Catchacan Green. I did fill the joints between the arms and the body on the painted model, but I may just rely on paint to do the job on most of the rest as they mostly fit together pretty well, with a few exceptions where filler is needed. Around half of the figures on the sprue have separate arms, the rest are one piece castings.


The box art suggested Vallejo 887 Brown Violet for the helmet, but I am a big fan of making US WW2 helmets look more, well, "green". Not sure why, it just feels more right (and helps differentiates them more from British figures too from a distance). You can see from the helmet on this guy that the level of raised detail on the unpainted figure (who has netting cast onto his helmet) does struggle to make it through two coats of paint and two of varnish and the same is true of some other areas on the figures, especially the webbing, where a little more relief in the casting/moulding might have been helpful to painters like me. .


Hands and face were a one-coat of Vallejo 019 Dark Flesh - it always seems a little pale to me, and maybe the box suggestion of 815 Basic Skin Tone is darker? As well as shooting and advancing riflemen the sprue contains a number of officers, one casualty and (I think) a medic.

The ratio of officers (or more accurately, blokes using radios or holding binoculars) to "men doing stuff" seems a little high, although with 50-odd figures in the box there is clearly plenty of scope to make a decent platoon and have a bit of attrition along the way. Maybe another reason why having more "arms" on the sprue, so some of the officers could have been demoted to riflemen, would have been useful?


The two PSC figures are here on the left, with the Matchbox ones on the right. The officer's coat is Coat d'arms 215 Leather Brown - not sure if this is historical but I guess an officer could rustle up whatever he liked really...and the colour is one I know from my ECW figures really takes a Darktone varnish very well.


Gun stocks were all painted in Coat d'arms 235 Horse Tone Brown, with black + gunmetal drybrushed metalwork. Plastic Soldier Review suggests that the Matchbox figures are 21mm high and the PSC ones are 24mm high, but I can't really see quite that much difference on the tabletop myself - can you?


Finally, they were painted in ArmyPainter Quickshade Dark Tone, (including the base) and Testors Dullcot'ed. The bases were drybrushed in Bleached Bone and then light grey, with Silfor tufts and some static grass added at the end of the process.

Not too bad for a quick and dirty paint job I reckon...   now, I just have to actually find some decent weather to spray the rest, time to paint them and somehow time, space and terrain to play an actual game!

Here's a set of photos of the whole lot being painted (which I've added to this post later on).


The in-the-plastic set. I've used nearly all of the 3 sprues, and tried to swap a couple of arms around, with limited success it must be said..


Undercoated, and with the Faded Khaki done.


Flesh painted...

...and now I've finally finished them - see some more photos of the finished unit here 
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