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.

German Guns

I need a variety of Jerry guns for the paras to attack to play through the scenarios in the Red Devils scenario book. The first scenario is built around the attack on the Merville gun battery on the night before D-Day, so I'll need a gun or two to put in the massive casemate... but more on those in a future post. 

For today, I have a PaK-40 anti-tank gun:

This is a pretty nice mini, but I feel like the gun barrel is out of scale... it's as big around as the crew members' heads. That said, though, the mini is nice and should look fairly imposing as it lobs shell after murderous shell at the Tommies.

I decided not to make a base for this gun because I plan to put it in my fancy Grand Manner trench system. I may still build a base for it.  The figures are unbalanced enough that they have to be leaning against the parts of the gun in order to remain upright, so it would be nice if I could put the whole thing on a solid foundation, but it would have to be a base where I could remove the gun itself, which would be tough... I wouldn't trust Blu-Tac to hold it.


Next, an le.IG 18 infantry gun:

This is a fun model. The gun was fairly easy to assemble (though putting the shields on the four guns I built in the last week all felt a bit sketchy... the connection points are small and I don't know how strong the glue is), and the crew figures are cool - especially the guy yelling his Aryan face off as he pulls his little box. I put the figures on washers and based them as normal, because an infantry gun like this is fairly portable and will probably move around quite a bit, unlike the PaK and the artillery. 

As a final note, I wish the Nazis had given the crazy capitalization on their acronyms a rest. Seriously, le.IG 18? Either capitalize everything or nothing. No wonder everybody thought they were dicks.

Dead Cows

Yep. Dead cows.

I'm not very happy at all with how these poor exploded fellas turned out, but I didn't want to commit a lot of time to repainting them. They are just dead cows.

I guess you can't win them all.

German Third Squad

I actually painted these guys when I went up north for Christmas, but never got around to finishing their bases until I needed them for a test game I played last week. I had hoped to get my big order of paras by Christmas, but they arrived the day after I got back. Oh well, I can always use more plastic Germans.