I don’t have that much time at the moment, but I do steal an hour from my family life once in a while. When working on my two Normandy armies I have always built what I felt for at the moment, and because of that I have finished lots of stuff but not necessary what I need most for getting started. I really have to be more organized, especially now when I have a small kid at home. I still have the urge to do some things more than others… so at the moment, when I’m not very much into painting I do lots of model building instead.
Here are some of the things I have worked on the last couple of weekends, models that I will need to be able to play the first couple of missions in the Kampfgruppe Normandy rulebook. The La Fière Bridge campaign which I am also preparing for, has to wait a while.
Two M10 Wolverines will be used in the Bridges at St. Jules mission, later on I will need six of them, I can as well build and paint them all at the same time. As the M10’s are Armourfast models, the level of details isn’t very high… I have tried do make them look a little bit more like “normandy” tanks. It is hard to find the balance though, suddenly you have used too much time adding details that it would be better off to just buy models that has more details. But in this case it is mostly stowage that I have added, and that I would have been doing regardless of which brand I had to choose. In most pictures I have seen, loose tarpaulin is covering parts of the tank… doing this on my tanks will help me hide that two of the tanks is missing their gun breeches (the old version of Armourfast’s M10 didn’t have them!?). I made the tarpaulins by using thin paper tissue soaked in white glue thinned with water and formed to look like the real deal. When dry it is hard and will look fairly realistic. When the models has been painted I will show more detailed pictures.
Those Hasegawa Stuarts has been painted a long time ago, recently I did fresh them up with my airbrush, after doing this I did add more stowage – some paint and this cute little tanks will be ready to go. They will also be used in the Bridges at St. Jules mission but later on I will need five in one mission. The other two I have bought already, but as this three are M3’s and I’m not even sure if there where any M3’s in Normandy, the new one’s are M5’s (from MMS). I have made “loose hanging” tarpaulin using the same technique as on the M10’s above – this is a cheap way to make stowage as the boxes underneath is just cardboard cut up in small pieces.
Three Schimmwagens from Academy and one from Hasegawa. Usually you have to buy a vehicle pack to get the schwimmwagen from Academy but I discovered that a few shops has them as single vehicle blisters. These are great models and I bought them to use for my recce units. I will not paint them right off as they won’t be needed for a while.
This US Howitzers will be used in the Night Combat mission. A game played with special night rules, where a US infantry platoon together with this four guns will defend themself against a nasty Fallschirmjägers elite platoon along with a FJ pioneer squad that brings a flamethrower – I can’t wait to play this mission!!! The models are from SHQ – quite nice, but it took some time removing flash and mould lines, especially the first one was a bugger, but I managed to get better speed on the next ones. All figs are AB Figures.
Some Armourfast Shermans along with a single Revell. They will get the same treatment as the M10’s – more stowage and maybe one or two of them will get a hedge cutter.
Next up will be six StuG’s and towing trucks for the howitzers.
Ad Machina Wargaming 