Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Hummels, Part the Third - and other toys.

 Assembly of this pair of Hummel SP guns more or less completed, now begins the paint job.  Contrary to my usual practice, I undercoated these chappies black before applying its 'factory finish' base coat of yellow.

Since my previous posting, I finally figured out how to do the louvres - unfortunately, after having already applied my 'lesser solution' of placing a rectangle of very thin plastic sheet which I was hoping to get away with simply painting them on.  As it happens, an even better solution might have been to cover the area with a box-type arrangement as seems to have been an occasional practice.  On these models the louvre assembly stands prouder of the vehicle sides than I would like, but I'm hoping that careful paint work will disguise this and other imperfections that I can see.
It was whilst typing the rest of this posting I finally - much too late - figured out how to do the louvres properly.  First off, cut out an appropriate sized rectangle at the appropriate location in the sheet forming the sides of the fighting compartment.  Back it with thin plastic sheet.  This backing will not be noticeable in the interior of the fighting compartment.  Then place in 4 strips of thin plastic sheet such that each overlaps the one below.  Place a thin plastic frame around the whole; and two thin strips at the 'third points' along the louvres.  This is pretty much how I did it except for the cut-out at the beginning.  Had I thought of it, the whole assembly would have been almost flush with the side armour.   But that is generally my experience with tackling unfamiliar tasks.  By the time I've finished, I figure I've just about learnt enough to begin.

 The right hand vehicle in this picture shows an arrangement I am tempted to use on the other.  My researches indicate this was quite a common arrangement: a couple of spare road wheels, and some of those red/white/red rods you often see attached to German ordnance.  That the guns look skew-whiff in this picture is not an illusion; they haven't been glued in yet.
 One of the problems of the black undercoat: the first top coat looks as rough as guts.  The farther vehicle has had a second coat applied.
 Some more toys that have been awaiting my attention.  My thanks go to Brian (A Fist Full of Plastic - see the sidebar for the link) for most of these (the PzIV and FlaK gun excepted), for which he'll be getting one of the Hummels I've been building.


The PzIV is missing a road wheel.  That, the Tiger I tanks and the FlaK 8.8cm gun have all been pre-painted.  Rather than go the Simple Green paint stripper way, I simply paint over the top.  The downside of course is that detail gets a bit obscured.  This will be rectified by black outlining.  The end result is generally satisfactory.  
The Wespe is a 'new' model I recently assembled.  Not much to say about it, really, except that along with one of the Hummels above, it will be part of my second (Orotina's 122nd) SP artillery battalion.  Whilst putting on the tracks, though, the left hand return wheel came adrift rather too easily for comfort.  I solved that by drilling a hole through it and the hull shoving in a short length of paper clip wire and gluing that in.  Seems to have worked...

The Jagdtiger,  assembled but for the side skirts and with the gun broken off, has been put together, and will probably form part of Orotina's 654th (Independent) Heavy Panzer Company.  Strictly, it ought to be counted as a Jagdpanzer Company as are my Jagdpanthers and Jagdpanzer IVs, but the latter form a small Abteilung.  The Jagdtigers I reckon should stand alone...




21 comments:

  1. Nice collection of Jerry amour. 20mm, I take it? NWill you be adding any camo once the dunkelgelb is done? I am

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    1. Yes: the dunkelgelb is merely 'factory finish' as I like to call it. Plenty of paint work yet to be done on these! It's all 1:76/1:72 stuff, depending on manufacturer.
      Cheers,
      Ion

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  2. Hummels are coming along really well. Those "red/white/red rods" are variously referred to as aiming posts, aiming stakes or stadia rods and are used for laying the gun for indirect fire. If that is an Airfix PzIV I can help you out with missing wheels or just about anything else as I have nearly a complete kit in the spares box.

    Cheers, Dave

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    1. That may depend where you hail from, Dave: I live in Shakesburg (a.k.a. Christchurch), New Zealand. But if you do have spares available that can be got here easily, I have another PZIV F2 lacking at least four road wheels! Otherwise, I have one other possibility I can check out...

      As for those rods, I thought of calling them 'ranging rods' or 'calibration rods', but didn't in fact know what they were called, or even how they were used. Thanks for the info.
      Cheers
      Ion

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    2. I'm in Australia. Happy to send you some Airfix PzIV wheels if you need them. I have already taken everything I needed from the kit for some rebuilds, so let me know.

      Cheers, Dave

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  3. Ion

    Great following your progress on this project... I'm also in a 20mm 'zone' at the moment, getting OLD stuff and rejuvenating/re-basing for Spearhead.. a la Nick Grant's passion. There's HUGE nostalgia with this old stuff.. I painted some of it in the mid 1970s when "I were a mere lad, ee by gum"

    Kind regards
    Robin

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  4. Cheers, Robin. Do you know, there was a time recently in which I was seriously looking into doing my stuff up for Spearhead. I had tried the game out before, and it seemed OK. Trouble was, no one seemed to be doing it in 20mm scale (all 6mm stuff). I did ask, and although the WW1 version was going 20mm (such as your own Great War projects), WW2 was remaining solidly 6mm.

    So I have stayed with 'Command Decision', with occasional forays (at huge expense in organization of my kit) into 'Panzer Marsch!'
    Cheers,
    Ion

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  5. Ion

    We have 'kit for Africa'.. no shortage (well, actually it's amazing how my recollection of how much stuff I had differs from reality -- so might need some more - that' what I'm telling Lorraine anyway, "honest Dear, I'm just FINISHING an old project, so I need to buy a little bit more"), so we can certainly put on 20mm games in SH without you needing to provide kit.

    Doesn't CD use the same infantry basing?

    Kind regards
    Robin

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    1. Not 100% certain on that last question. The standard infantry base in CD used to be 7/8" x 5/8" with two figures. To be honest, I've never liked that system (possibly my one big caveat about CD), and am beginning to standardize on stands double that size, sometimes with 3 figures. It is possible that over the years this has changed. At any rate, on the blogs I follow that play CD (including its latest incarnation) seem to have larger stands than one might expect.

      The only effect is that a wider dispersion is needed as a counter to artillery, and there is a reduction in firepower per unit frontage.

      I would quite like to join in a few SH games, but there's the small matter of the quantities of WW2 stuff that I have already (I must have over 50 German tanks and assault guns alone; 20-odd British and 25 Soviet - mind you, that's nothing compared with some armies kicking around this town). Getting it on the table is the sticking point right now...
      Cheers,
      Ion

      I understand SH stands to be an inch or maybe 30mm square.

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    2. I quite agree with you on the basing stand sizes for CD Ion. I go larger myself, but I could see rivet counters kicking up a fuss if I tuned up at a tournament with them.

      The Hummels are humming along nicely. Good work.

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    3. Thanks for your comment, Paul. I make a further comment about the 'rivet counters' below, in response to Robin Sutton's reply to my query. Personally, I don't do competitions/tournaments (I quit competitive chess more than 20 years ago) never having being able to fathom their raisons d'etre.

      About 8 years ago I won a 'Panzer Marsch' club competition, but entering that was to help foster interest in WW2, and no one here was playing CD at the time. It succeeded in building up interest all right, but it also succeeded I believe in killing it off. Weird.
      Cheers,
      ion

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  6. very nice work. those are some very nice scratchbuit self propelled guns. your work with plastic card is almost as good as a professional kit build!, and is infact better than many of the products availible on the market. great work

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    1. Thanks, Gowan. Now that I've begun the camo and finally glued the guns in they are starting to look like something, I think.
      Cheers,
      Ion

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  7. Ion

    Standard sized is 1.25" square (that's what I use).

    Nick G uses 40mm square.. it impacts on troop densities, but when we play 20mm games we increase the ground scale by 50% to allow for the larger model vehicle sizes, and so base sizes can be that little bit larger... most important is that BOTH sides use the same base size. The number of figs on each base is immaterial.

    Kind regards
    R

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    1. What you say, Robin, and Paul's approach (comment above) make a lot of sense: if both sides are agreeable, where's the harm? At that, the rivet counters Paul mentions would be wiser not to rush into a moan fest if one does appear with larger than standard base sizes. So far as I can make out, the larger base size confers no advantage in game terms (just aesthetics), and maybe a couple of small disadvantages - inconveniences really, and those pretty minor.
      Cheers,
      Ion

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    2. The larger base is also a pain in the buttocks when mounting them into the transport assets I might add, while Al's smaller (legal) stands fit nicely on the decks of his trucks, my larger (more aesthetic)stands are at all angles.

      Its a bit of give and take sometimes.

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  8. Awesome, what a concentration of heavy artillery! Much work on my own collection always jealous on nicely painted vehicles of other wargamers.

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    1. Really just taking the opportunity to finish off some outstanding projects whilst doing the same with the SP guns. Mind you my German/Orotinian army does include quite a lot of artillery as artillery - at least 9x10.5 cm towed gun/howitzers, 1 (4 more required) 150L30 piece; I think 6x7.5cm infantry guns at last count (4 metal, 2 cardboard scratchbuilds - and I need at least 3x150L11 infantry guns...); 2xSdKfz 251/9; a couple of armoured cars with 75L24 guns; at least 10 PaK40 AT guns and a couple of PaK38s (50L60). Oh, and I forgot mu 15.0cm infantry gun mounted upon a Pz I chassis.

      Of course I'll never bring them all to the table-top. It's just that I like to have my formations fully represented.
      Cheers,
      Ion

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  9. A really nice, and impressive, collection!

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    1. Thanks, Phil - though this is really some unfinished stuff in need of tidying up! I may have more of a parade of troops later on...
      Cheers,
      Ion

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  10. In regard to rivet counters Ion to me its about the game and to hell what the purists say. The work is excellent and as long as you enjoy making them and playing the game go with what makes you happy.

    Excellent work by the way.

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