Tank Restoration Project

A few weeks ago a local gamer was selling off some extra German tanks.  Always on the lookout for a good deal this on caught my eye.  There were about 20 tanks, mostly Panzer IV variants.  I made an offer sight unseen.

I thought I was kind of low-balling but it turns out I might have over paid.  I have never been afraid of an army restoration project and have done lots of 40K stuff that was severely used.  This was going to be a massive project.

Here are three of seven PzIV F1, F2 and G that were in the lot.  Most had very heavy paint with the looks of 2-3 repaints.  Many had damage that needed repairing.  All were very poorly assembled.  The tank in the middle is featured in the pictures below.

This Panzer IV G was the worst of the lot.  This picture shows the hull after 6-8 hours of soaking in Simple Green.  The top layer of tan came off very easy but the other 5 layers of paint took a bit longer. EDIT: The more I look at this picture the more it looks like it was pulled from a Russian bog after 60 years.

A few more hours of soaking and a hour of scraping with dental picks give you something like this. 

Not all the tanks were in bad shape and some cleaned up rather easy.  Here is a good one with less than an hour of work compared the worst after about the same amount of time.

Here are 6 of the 7 tanks after all the paint stripped off.  The worst one is in the upper left of the picture.

This is the worst of the lot after paint stripping and reassembly.  All the tanks got a fresh coat of Panzer Grey. 

In the end I managed to salvage 7 Panzer IV.  These took about 10 hours of work, not including the soak time.  These are ready for the next step to getting back to the table.  There are still about 13 mort tanks to restore in this lot so stay tuned for more.

Flames of War Fallschirmjager Reinforcements

 I just finished up a few odds and ends for my FoW Fallschirmjagers.  I have had these in process for more than a year but I just could not get them done.  I recently has the FJ back on the table and my love for this army was rekindled.

First up are a few extra command stands.  These will be used in various army configs where I need a command team for a small unit.

Next are three sniper teams.  I have never used snipers and I have never faced them but I am really intrigued by them.  I can;t wait to try them out as I know my regular opponents have very little experience as well.

This is the first of two character teams I painted up.  This one will be used as Major Von Der Heydte and also as an Infantry Ace if we ever do an aces campaign.

Finally we have another character team.  This one is Oberstleutnant Walter Koch.  The only time I have ever used a special character warrior team in Flames of War was at this year's Shifting Sands event.  My lack of experience meant that I did not get the full potential from the character.  I am looking forward to trying out both of these characters to see how they really work in the game.

Workbench Update

So far this year has been pretty sad for me and getting regular updates on the blog.  This is mainly due to not painting as much stuff as normal.  Or maybe I should say that I am not completing as much as I have in the past.

This has actually been a pretty good year, so far, for playing games.  I have gotten in quite a few Flames of War games as well as Bolt Action games.  I have even managed to get in a Black Powder game.

I have been working on a few projects and I should have lots more updates soon - good ones, not just lame excuses.  Coming soon are some more FoW Fallschirmjagers.  I am nearing completion on  some extra command stands as well as some snipers.  We are trying to gather forces for a Market Garden campaign later this summer and my FJ should get lots of table time for this.  I also have pioneers, heavy mortars and heavy artillery to add to this army.

I acquired a collection of used German tanks for Flames of War from a local gamer.  At first it seemed like it might be a pretty fair deal but having spent some time with the tanks it is looking lots like a charity deal.  Oh well, I really like salvage projects and this one is definitely salvage.  I plan to use most of these tanks for a late 42 - early 43 11th Panzer Division project.  This will be focused on the Chir River battles.  It should be pretty fun as this will be my first winter force.  I am planning several posts for the restoration of these tanks and building of the army.

My Kampfgruppe Hummel project will be continuing as well.  This army should see time in the Market Garden games so I need to get this done.  I need a few more Tigers and then a couple of Pz IV and Pz III to finish it up.

For Bolt Action I finally decided to build the Perry British 8th Army and have started the assembly and collection of forces.  I have nearly finished assembling the first box of troops and I have a British Mk VIc tank that I got for Warlord during their big tanks sale.  I need to add more support and troops.  This should see some progress as the summer progresses.

I need to get my Napoleonic French project back on track as well.  I did manage to assemble all the Victrix models I have collected and started painting but then it got back-burnered.  We are still hoping to get a BP game in for the 1813 campaign this Fall so time is a wasting.  I still need to acquire some more models for this.

There are lots of cool plastic releases in the pipeline that have me really excited.  Plastic Soldier Company has KV-1 and late PZ III sets coming soon and there new IS-2 box is really cool.   This is just the type of stuff that will get me inspired.

Maybe I should finish painting my Captain America and Bucky figures...

Enough chitchat...time to get back to painting.

US M3 Halftracks for Flames of War

On a whim a few weeks ago I bought a set of Plastic Soldier Company M3 Haftracks.  OK, it was not really a whim, I have been wanting some of these for my US army for a long time.  An Armored Rifle Platoon will be a nice addition to my mid-war US Tank Company.  The Armored Rifle platoon can be a very expensive unit to model for FoW (but it is getting a little cheaper with the new plastic set from Battlefront).  The tracks are one of the main expenses for this unit and the PSC option saves lots of money.

The kit is pretty nice and very similar to their other sets.  The instructions are adequate for the job. It would have been nice to get a little detail on the different models and options but it is easy enough to find on the web.

 I did find these to be a little fiddly (the first model of a new PSC set is always the toughest) to build and if you don't like to build models you are probably not going to like these much.

Since these are for my 1943 Tunisian theamed US force I opted for the M3 rather than the M3A1 model.  The only real difference is the A1 has the ring mount for the AA MG rather than the pintle mount.

The platoon HQ track is the only one that gets the winch.  All the others get the bumper with the roller.

I really love these models, and all the PSC models I have built.  Now I need to dig out the infantry and the 37mm AT gun and get them painted up.

Black Powder ACW Game Photo Dump

Last weekend some friends and I got together for a Black Powder American Civil War game.  It has been about 6 months since we have put on a big game and it was great to see it back on the table.  W played a simple meeting engagement with 3 brigades to a side.  Tom created some random unit generation charts and we tried them out for the first time.  This randomizes the number of regiments per brigade, the size of each regiment, the troop quality and the special abilities of the unit.  This worked pretty well and is likely to be a regular feature of our ACW games.

Here is a quick photo dump of the game.  Sorry for the lack of photo editing and resizing but my laptop is in the shop and that make things a little tough.

More Tiger I for Flames of War

 A couple of years ago I acquired three late Tiger Ie tanks for a sweet price.  I painted them up and added them to the collection but I really had no idea what to do with them.  To make matters worse I was not playing any late war armies and as a result they never made it to the table.  With the release of the Bridge by Bridge supplement for Flames of War I found a use for these tanks as well as a reason  to buy even more - Kampfgruppe Hummel.

The core of this army list are Tiger I tanks.  But they are not your usual killer Tigers that FoW is know for.  No Tiger Ace skills, no wide tracks but they do get Unreliable and Confident Trained.  The tanks are only 149 points each, which means you can have lots of them but the lack of abilities means that they are just tanks.  In late war armor 9,8,2 is not really very good.  Even with these drawbacks the idea of fielding a company of ten Tigers was too much to resist!

Here we have the next three Tigers for this force.  These are all Battlefront models.  I would have gone with Plastic Soldier Company if I did not already have three BF models.  The BF models are pretty good but they are starting to show their age (as are nearly all the BF metal/resin  models).

The company commander is the Michael Wittman model from Battlefront.  I was really disappointed in this model. I was really hoping that this would be a variant of the standard Tiger I model but it is actually the same one you get in the blister.  For this model I used the commander figure from the old GE072 Tiger I from BF (this is the old Kursk Tiger that is OOP). 

With all the hatches open there is no doubt as to who the boss is.  The only problem with modeling the tank this way is that it is hard to turn the turret - but it looks cool!  On this tank I tried to model the front fender extension in the up position.  This was a pain but it turned out OK. 

The next tank was modeled with no fenders. It turns out that this was extremely rare for Tigers.  It seems that these tanks were really babied.  Since this force if for late war and comprised of salvaged tanks it seemed appropriate.  If anything the other tanks are in too good of shape but I plan to use these for several different armies so it is all good.

 The last tank in this set has lots of extra track section added.  This may be a little a-historic but I did find examples of this (just not all on one tank).  With the power of the late war guns it seem logical that any extra protection would be welcome.  The 17lb gun really makes short work of these tanks.

Next for this project are four more Tigers.  The plan was to do these as the early Tiger I and paint some for Eastern front and at least one for Tunisia.  I am thinking that I might get one more of the late Tiger and then build a couple of franken-tigers as these were very common with KG Hummel.  These are Tigers with a mix of early and late features reflecting their cobbled together nature.

It never ceases to amaze me how good my models look in person (IMO) and how bad they look in high resolution photos.  Just proof that my camera is better than my eye.

What Happened?

OK, it is late March and I just realized that I have not posted in nearly 2 months. I really try and post 3-4 times a month mainly as a way to keep me motivated.  And therein lies the problem, lack of motivation.  It really shocks me to realize that I have yet to paint (completely) a single miniature this year.  It is not as if I have been doing nothing hobby related, I just haven't been painting and posting.

So what have I been doing?  Well, February was spent with Bolt Action.  From the end of the Shifting sands Kursk event until the beginning of this month I played lots of Bolt Action.  I started by doing some test games in preparation for Gathering in the Desert 2 day tournament.  Then there was the event itself followed the next weekend by yet another BA tournament.

The Gathering event was a blast and was really one of the best weekend's gaming ever. I went into the event with the idea of taking lots of photographs and making notes of each game.  I planned to do several posts just on this event but, as it turns out, I managed to take pictures of the tables only.  I have included three of the best in this post but they were all top notch.

I would love to share with you shots of the cool painted armies (all the armies were painted).  I guess you can just go to http://gatheringinthedesert.blogspot.com/ and take a look at what Tim has posted.  There is also some coverage on Tim's blog as well as Jeremy's blog.

Randy also did a couple of videos of each day's happenings.  Day 1 and Day 2

All of this Bolt Action action has done a couple of things.  First, it is time to step back and play something else for a while.  The plan was to get in some SAGA and then back to Flames of War.  That has not panned out and we just jumped back into Flames.  We have a new player that Tim and I are helping to get into the game so we have been doing small, 600 point battles.  This is a great way to learn the game and refresh the rules.  The other result of the Bolt Action action is I have decided to build my Perry 8th Army figures and fully flesh out an army.  They are just too good to ignore and the Perry's have been adding lots of cool stuff to the line.

Time for a confession, one of the biggest reason for the lack of hobby progress and updates is due to the evil of video games.  Just after the first of the year I started playing Fallout New Vegas.  As a huge fan of Fallout 3 I just had to play this game.  Turns out that it has managed to eat about 200 hours of my life that I will never get back and I have nothing to show for the investment (other than my PS3 trophies).  Please, please, please stay away from the video games.  They will destroy your hobby life.

Hopefully, I am back on track for some regular updates.