Barbed Wire

This was a quick little project to prepare some defences for my 28mm table:

These are paint stirrers (free from the hardware store), with 1.5" nails for posts (a few pennies each...?), and old discarded window screen cut into individual strings for the wire. This is just a representative sample, I have a bunch more.

It would be easy to go crazy with more interwoven wire, and it would look a bit better for it, but I didn't have the time or the patience. Stringing one wire past another is super fiddly, because all of those little cross-bits act like velcro on each other, and the wire doesn't slide over itself at all. Also, looking at some illustrations of actual WW2 German wire defences, I could have modelled them a lot more horizontal than vertical... similar criss-crossing shapes, but laid out a foot or so above the ground, to make it really tough to walk through. Maybe next time... I'm a long, long way from running out of window screen!

Pretty easy and relatively quick, and I think the window screen works really well for barbed wire. I used the same materials for my 15mm FoW defences, but I think it's more suited to this scale.

BMW Motorcycles and Sidecars

Well I thought my next post was going to be a divergence from my regular WW2 shenanigans, but I have a club night coming up and need to finish a few items for a game I plan to host there. So here are the last of the actual miniatures I needed to paint for club night:

These guys were a bit fiddly to put together, and I feel like I could have done a better job of painting them if I had taken more time and care, but like I said, I have a deadline approaching. They look cool on the table, and they can be pretty nasty with their MGs!

Plus, what's cooler than a sidecar?

German Big Guns

I went a bit nuts taking photos of these guys, but they look pretty inspiring set up in the trenches:

I have thought about adding some camo netting to the poles sticking up around the gun pits, but I'm worried about it causing playability problems. It's one of the many, many items on my to-do list, though.

My next post will be something very different, I think...

Trenches and Bunkers

Earlier this year I took delivery of a set of trenches from Grand Manner in the UK:

This is just a representative sample... I have more than a metre of trenches all together, with a variety of zigzag sections, corners, gun pits, junctions, and (as above) a section of command entrenchment.

I didn't paint these (except for the gun and crew in the bottom photo, that was me). Grand Manner offers their scenery painted at an additional cost, and I decided to have them sent to me all dressed. They were (very!) expensive, but I couldn't be happier with them. The detail is really nice, the paint jobs are fantastic, and the resin is heavy and seems tough. My only regret is that I don't have more! I would love to do a larger entrenchment, but with what I paid for these, it will be a long time before I add to the collection. Price aside, the photos speak for themselves. A+


I also recently bought some bunkers from Baueda:

These ones I did have to paint. I used my airbrush to give them some subtle colour variation, with patchy areas of green-ish and brown-ish. It's not super obvious, but I'm happy with the effect. The bunkers were very nice casts and required no clean-up at all before I primed and painted them. I have a 'Tobruk' bunker as well, but I need to build a little hillock to put it on first.

The vines are SceneMaster Botanicals, which I bought at a railroad store ages ago. I was excited to get them home and use them, but when I opened the package I discovered that there was very little foliage to be found, especially for the price I paid. So the vines sat in their box for quite a while before I found something I was willing to use them on. They were a bit of a pain to shape and glue on, and it remains to be seen if they will be strong enough to withstand wargaming usage. They look pretty nice though.