What a Tanker accessories

They say when it rains it pours. Only two days after I received Blood Red Skies, What a Tanker arrived in my mailbox with a resounding thud. If you haven't been around, What a Tanker is Too Fat Lardies' answer to the Tanks game that was released about a year ago.

There's a German tank with the commander in the open hatch on both covers. The similarities end there.

Lots of loot! Part one: The Dice Bag Lady delivers!

At the beginning of the summer Koen put in an order from the Dice Bag Lady for some of her female soviet figures, and I joined in to save postage. Because of reasons (life, the universe and everything) we didn't manage a hand-over until just recently. 

Anyway, not wanting to start a full-blown Soviet force, I bought a pack of tank riders and a sniper team. Since I have an Italeri Sherman that is the wrong version for my brits I'm thinking of painting it up as soviet and making a diorama out of it.

DiceBagLady soviet female tank riders.

Kneeling Sniper team.

More MDF Madness

...or should that be Moar MDF Madness?

An Upright Piano from 4Ground and a nice little Village Fountain from Sarissa Precision.

As I told you in yesterday's post I had recently aquired two small MDF kits and now was the time to build them. (If you didn't read the building of the piano yesterday go back and do so now.) Here's how I built the fountain.

The fountain comes on one sheet of 2mm MDF.

The sides of the basin is built up using three layers on top of eachother.

The top layer is slightly larger and overhangs the walls. On the right the parts for the pump tower.

And finished. Our intrepid German soldiers liberate another piece of terrain.

I didn't mount the taps since they were flat and I plan on replacing them with pieces of wire instead. The design is a bit cruder than 4ground's kits, but it is easier to assemble and goes together without any problems. The thicker MDF is not as prone to warping as the thin sheets in the 4ground kits. You have to paint it yourself though, which I don't think is a problem really.

Timeline Miniatures 28mm Normandy Farmhouse Ruin

In my last post I reviewed the Timeline Miniatures 28mm buildings. However, I didn't have time to build both houses. So without further ado, here's the building (pun intended) of Timeline Miniatures 28mm Normandy Farmhouse Ruin.

The Normandy Farmhouse ruin costs double the amount of the other ruin but contains many more parts.

Timeline Miniatures 28mm ruined buildings review

When I started gaming WW2 I naturally used my 1/72 or 1/76 scale figures on my Märklin model train layout. This was a very long time ago and I used my own homebrew rules that had grown out of simple play. I then discovered "proper" wargaming in the way of Warhammer and was instantly drawn in. Years later when I returned to WW2 gaming I naturally chose 20mm and 6mm as my preferred scale, but secretly I yearned for the magnificent Wargames Foundry figures (I even bought a few) but I realised that terrain would be a big problem, and by terrain I mean buildings.

Two ruins were my choice to test out the range, there are unbombed versions of the same buildings available.

Back then during the late 90's the only 28mm buildings available were the expensive Grand Manner models in resin easily setting you back 50-80 pounds for a house. Not so much now, with the advent of CAD engineering, 3D printing and computer programmed laser engraver and cutters everything is different. There has been a number of small (and large) companies providing laser cut MDF terrain springing up here and there the last couple of years. Timeline Miniatures appears to be the latest in a market that is not yet saturated.

The small ruin opened up. The loose pieces are the left over squares from the window and not used.

Bridge over troubled water

Small update, between ferverently painting stuff for Gothcon (just shy of two weeks away!)

What do you call the middle of a song? Oh, you've heard that joke.

This is of course the Italeri bridge I previewed earlier. Basecoated, washed and drybrushed in much the same way as the small shrine from last post.

Building the world's smallest crucifix

For the record I'm an atheist, or maybe a heathen. Pagan, whatever. I don't care, I don't believe.

But the little people who live on my gaming table are probably religious, more or less anyway. There's a saying that there are no atheists in a fox hole and that may be true. But if we are a little bit more serious the inhabitants of Normandy in 1944 would mostly be of the Christian faith. So when I saw this little roadside shrine on eBay I knew it would fit right in.

Made by Extratech, the copyright is 1999 but the kit is still available.

Painting table Saturday

There's a thing now on blogger where you show your painting table on Saturday. It was started by Sofie of Sofie's Paint Blog who also drew the nice graphic below.

I have forgotten about it previously, or I wasn't doing any painting on Saturdays, but today I remembered. Too bad I'm not painting,  just doing a lot of assembling. But here goes.

Yep, todays painting table is the kitchen table! 

Jump Off Points for Chain of Command

A wrecked cart and a lot of battlefield debris from Sgts Mess.

Oooh look a motorcycle! That will look spiffing in a ditch!

Until next time.

Electric!

I'm sorry for the lack of updates, but fear not dear friends, I have been making progress. My work sent me on a three day course out of town. I did bring some paints and some miniatures but I mostly did undercoating and shading work. Too dark in the hotel room to paint properly. When I got back home I was a bit tired of painting US paras so I decided to do some scenery items for a change.

A transformer station. No, not the kind that turns into a giant robot.

4Ground 20mm Hayloft build and review

As you might be aware of, 4Ground are makers of very fine, pre-painted MDF building kits. So far their kits have only been available in 15 and 28mm much to my sadness as they look very good indeed. Now Plastic Soldier Company have released  a line of 20mm buildings made by 4Ground to specifications by PSC. The first release is a Normandy farm complex available either as one large bundle or as individual buildings.

The whole shablooie. The Big Kahuna. The Mother of all Farm complexes. You get the picture.

I couldn't resist ordering one of the buildings when PSC had their black friday sale recently and opted for the Hayloft, top right in the above picture.

Systema Gaming Scenery Power generators assembly and review

I've got the power!

Impressed by the Storage Silo I reviewed previously, I bought a pair of Power Generators from Systema. A sheet of 5mm MDF and a small sheet of orange acrylic is enough to build two of these babies. The assembly was -- as with the Silo -- very straight forward. No instructions are included but it's hardly necessary. It would be nice though for the more inexperienced builder I think.

I used ordinary white wood glue thinned with a little bit water and applied with a brush. It gives you a little wiggle-room and enough time to pull the pieces apart if you make a mistake, but dries fast enough so you do not have to wait long periods. All parts can only fit in one way so if you have to shave or file down a lug to get it to fit, you are trying to assemble it wrong!

I did however hit a couple of snags. The first was that glueing the acrylic pieces was harder than I anticipated. The fit is not as good as with the MDF parts so they move around a bit, and trying to align eight pieces of plastic between to circles of MDF at the same time was quite interesting. I thought of using superglue to first glue them rigid to one MDF pieces, but then I wouldn't have been able to adjust any of them if they weren't glued on 100% straight.

The second problem was that when popping out the parts I ended up with a cog-wheel shape that was left over. It was simply superfluous material used between two other parts on the MDF sheet, but I thought it was used to align the acrylic beams. For half an hour I tried to get it to fit before I realised my mistake.



I did a time-lapse video of the assembly and you can see how I try to fit the part around the acrylic beams, and that I try different ways of holding the acrylic. In the end I just held and pressed them in one hand. The acrylic does not absorb the glue like the MDF, so I had to wait a while for the glue on them to dry before I dared touching them. While waiting I undercoated the base with white primer. The whole process took about two hours, including trying and refitting the acrylics, brewing coffee, talking to my wife on the phone and undercoating the base. Next time I will start with the acrylic beams and then I can do the base while the first parts dry, so it should take less than an hour. The "power" assembly can be removed so you can use the base as it is if you like, which gives you a bit more variety.

At 12 Euros for a pair they are very good value for money. As evidenced by the Plague Marine in the picture above they are quite large as well. While not exactly gothic they could be a piece of Eldar or Tau machinery and would also fit very nicely into a game of Infinity or Star Wars. Systema provides good service and are very nice to deal with.

I give the System Gaming Scenery Power Generators 4 out of 5.
Recommended and good value for your money.

Systema Gaming Scenery: Storage Silo review

Systema Gaming Scenery is another one of those small businesses that sprouts up here and there; one-man operations benefiting from the Internet making them easier to get noticed by potential customers and the world smaller. This is fortunate because there are lots of creative people out there with access to a stockpile of MDF board and a laser cutter making beautiful things. This one is located in Slovenia, a country I know very little about to be honest.

The Storage Silo in all it's glory.

System Gaming Scenery doesn't have a proper webshop, instead they have a blog with a catalog. If you want to order something you email them and you get a PayPal invoice back. Simple and efficient. Shipping to EU countries is free for orders above 50 Euros, to non-EU countries it's free above 70 euros, and to the rest of the world shipping is free on orders above 100 euros. Not bad considering that MDF board weighs quite a lot. This kit cost only 16 Euro which I think is a great price!

Warlord Games Ruined Farmhouse Review

As I was proof-reading the Chain of Command rules from TooFatLardies I got inspired to restart my WW2 28mm project. I had a bunch of models already but lacked any terrain. Renedra has a bunch of nice generic stuff, and I was curious about Warlord Games' Bolt Action range. I decided to order their Ruined Farmhouse kit during their Free Postage offer in August. It costs 15 pounds which seems like a fair price, on par with the Renedra houses, and is also available in a "Ruined Hamlet" box with three identical kits for 35 pounds.

A whole house in that little box?

So what are my thoughts about it?

Leven miniatures review, part 2

As I mentioned in part 1, I also recieved Jocke's buildings. We figured we'd save the nice guys at Leven some postage since they were giving us the stuff for free. Now me and Jocke don't live in the same town, so he's a bit curious to see his stuff. Therefore he gave me permission to review his pieces as well.

 Dimensions. length 40mm : depth 35mm : height 22mm

Leven Miniatures review

I recently won 10 pounds worth of buildings from Leven Miniatures in the Blog With No Name prize draw.

Leven Miniatures, if you didn't know, manufacture resin 1/300 scale buildings. Most are WW2-ish in style and they have plans on producing 10mm buildings as well. 10 pounds may not sound so much, but these buildings are quite cheap.

By random chance my mate Jocke (The Miniatures Man) also won 10 pounds worth of buildings. We decided to join forces in order to save some postage for the nice people at Leven Miniatures and Jocke mailed me his wish list which actually came to £9.50 letting me choose another 50 pence worth! (Yeah, I'm sad and cheap...). Jocke chose a bunch of desert and airfield themed stuff while I concentrated on civilian houses for the Western and Eastern fronts.

So what did I think of the buildings then?

Leven Miniatures giveaway

There's a chance of winning some very nice 6mm terrain over at The Blog with No Name. (Awesome name, btw, wish I had thought of that.)

Just what I have been searching for, a stone water mill. I'm serious, I need one for a scenario.

So far Leven Miniatures (which sponsors the giveaway) has released some very nice 6mm scenery, and they are also working on a 10mm range. So head over there and win some stuff! On second thought, I want the stuff myself so don't go there. Oh, all right then...

Barbed Wire WIP

Just a quickie today to show some of my barbed wire fences to my mates, Jocke and Thomas.

Nothing to do with a bad film starring Pamela Anderson.

The other side of the fence

I guess everybody has noticed I'm a big fan of Renedra's wargames accessories. I use their different sized bases for most stuff nowadays, from 6mm tanks to 28mm figures. I also like their scenic range and earlier I reviewed their wattle fences which I liked very much. This time I'm taking a closer look at their Wargaming Fences designed by Tim Adcock.

Wargaming fences from Renedra. Two sprues for £6.00

Desert desserts

There's some bits and pieces left from Operation Supercharge that I haven't shown you. First off there are some cute little softskins to show.

15cwt lorries, bren gun carriers and a dingo scout car.

The lorries are part of the infantry company and scout car represents the FAO attached to the regiment. In El Alamein the british drilled their artillery arms heavily with integrated observers in the forward units. Most significantly they developed "the stonk" where a single observer could call down a barrage from all available guns covering an area of 2400x1200 yards within minutes. Many axis counter attacks were broken up as soon they were spotted by such stonks. The carriers are from the AT platoon; when the 6-pounders deploy you can leave the carriers on the table to provide some light support or in case you need to move the guns to a better position.

The noble art of fencing

...as in building fences of course, what did you expect?

The last time I ordered a shed-load of bases from Renedra I also decided to check out one of their wargame fences. I selected on at random that I thought looked good and ended up with their Wattle fences. These are delivered as a grey plastic sprue with six pieces on them, intended for 28mm scale but probably suitable for 20mm too, maybe smaller scales as well.

The six pieces of wattle fencing.

I'm not exactly sure how old wattle fences are, except that people in various parts of the world has used the wattle and daub technique to build houses for 6000 years. I bet there has been wattle fences for at least as long. They are making a come back in modern gardening apparently, and one landscaping firm even claimed that "there should be no nails! And - they should be made in England!" 

Some modern wattle fences.