Warlord Games Panther Ausf. A plastic kit Build Review

As part of the Wheels of Steel offer by Warlord Games, I got myself the plastic  Panther A, that I wanted for quite some time.

The tank comes in the standard paper box containing 2 grey sprues, one sheet instructions manual and a decal sheet. The decals sheet was missing in my box, but the good folks at Warlord sent me a replacement one

With this tank I've decided to build/paint it a bit differently and to keep the running gears and tracks separate until the final weathering stage. Thus I've skipped the first step and built pretty much everything else. More on this once I start painting and weathering the Panther

As I prefer my vehicles to look a bit battered, I've removed some of the side skirts - this required some sanding and filling due to the attachment system - you can see someone was thinking here, so the skirts should survive some rough wargaming. I have also cut down the front mud guards - these were missing quite often and I wanted the muddy tracks to be visible.

Side skirts attachment system - you need to remove these

Cutting down the mud guards

Once this was dealt with, I've glued together the lower and upper part of the hull - which was a mistake, because you need to glue in the front machine gun first - it's doable later on (as I did), but it's better to do it before gluing the hull together. However the machine gun is a bit too small for the hole, so in the end I've filled it with some green stuff and then pressed the MG into it.

MG hole filled with green stuff

Rest of the build should be pretty straightforward, however the manual isn't really helping here - you need to study the final pictures to understand where should these go to, so go slow here!

Enhanced instructions

Construction of the turret is over in few minutes, I've skipped the "don't glue this with that, so you can elevate the gun" and glued the gun solid. Also I've kept the commander's MG separate for now, so it doesn't get broken during painting.

And that's pretty much it, in the end an hour of pleasant modelling, all of the parts fit really well and the tank looks awesome - can't wait to paint it next. Much recommended!

Afghan buildings for Skirmish Sangin - almost done!

It took me a while, but today I was finally able to get some time into my Afghan buildings for Skirmish Sangin. I made them few months ago, but never got to actually painting them.

In the end the painting process was pretty simple - I spray painted the base coat (Montana black XX that costs 3$/can) gave it a few days to fully dry and then applied a heavy dry brush of a Nerchau Hobby Acryl Antique White (2$/59ml bottle) - I really did not want to use my Vallejos for such large surfaces.

Base coat applied 

Drybrush - in reality it's a bit brighter

The buildings turned out pretty great - I might revisit them with a light dry brush of pure white as a final highlight here and there. I am also still not entirely sure what to do about the insides - I will probably keep them in the base color for now - the light drybrush can be added pretty much anytime in the future.

I will add some minor details to the houses to liven them up a bit - doors, corrugated metal garage doors, maybe a satellite dish or two.

I've taken a similar approach to the several wall sections I made, which means I'm getting very, very close to having a properly painted 1-table material and could get some gaming done!

In other Skirmish Sangin news, I have two Humvees ready for painting and I'm also working on one AH-64 Apache and a Mil Mi-24 Hind (this will be more of a terrain piece with this helo being a long abandoned wreck).

PART TWO - More Pics

Give it a day and all my buildings have been drybrushed and tested on a 3x4 table - there will be a demo game in September and there's still lot to do terrain wise, but I'm getting there - I even painted the Humvees and LAV-R today! Please note, that the minis are still not 100% finished.

Aerial view of my table with a crash landed AH-64

USMC team Alpha

"Let them come"

Leader instructing his troops

Better shot of the building

House with a garage - this will need a metal door

One of the fearless Taliban warriors

Trumpeter 1/72 UMSC LAV-R - build log Pt.1

After some time, that I spent on terrain pieces for Frostgrave, I needed some proper modelling - so I took out that USMC LAV-R I bought for Skirmish Sangin.

The kit is pretty basic - I did not count the pieces, but I managed to put it all together in an hour or hour and a half.

The most complicated part is the undercarriage, but considering how fiddly it could be, the result is awesome. This is the highlight of this kit, everything goes very well together and holds where it should be. I really enjoyed this part of the build.

After this, the rest of the model is pretty simple - just a bunch of various details that you glue on top and sides of the vehicle. The crane is probably the weakest part - even without looking at any reference photos, you can tell it's pretty basic. But given the intended use of this vehicle and the fact I'm pretty clumsy on the tabletop battlefields, I decided to just build it as it is.

Both halves of the vehicle go well together, you than close it with a rear panel and you're done!

Really, this has been an awesome kit - pure joy of  a tiny vehicle coming together very quickly with no issues at all.

Next up is painting, although I will have to fill in two tiny holes on the crane first - Mr Surfacer will suffice here. Then it's primer time, probably a bit of pre-shading and then onto my first randez vous with NATO 3-tone scheme.

It's a shame Trumpeter has closed down its small scale armor line, as this is a kit I would like to build again in future (multiple LAV's out there), but due to it being out of production it's not as easy to get your hands on it.

Can't remember I had so much fun with a kit.

Frostgrave ruins + Modelling with air hardening clay How To

With my first Frostgrave game behind me I knew I needed some more terrain and since the game is situated in a frozen city, we're talking about ruins - lots of ruins.

There's definitely plenty of suitable terrain on the market, 4Ground just released a brand new ruins set Ruins of Daldorr but even though these are lovely, they tend to be a bit pricey + I do enjoy building terrain pieces myself. All you need is a piece of cardboard (I use 2 mm thick one), PVA glue and DAS clay (or any other similar air hardening clay)

My first mini set was a set of two broken down walls - I plan on glueing them together as they will form what is left of one house.

My first two walls for Frostgrave, all done in 90 minutes.

The 'how-to' of working with cardboard and DAS clay is pretty simple - cut the cardboard as you want your walls to look like, then take a piece of clay, take a rolling pin so you end up with a pretty thin layer of clay (1-3 mm thick). Apply PVA glue to the wall and put the clay on it - you want to press it together hard, so it stays there.
Now comes the hardest part - waiting. You need to give the clay some time to dry - the harder it is, the more precise your scribing will be. My approximate drying times are as follows:

• For medieval/fantasy rough stone walls - around 45 minutes
• For bricks - an hour, hour and a half

Of course anything longer than that, you end up with pretty much solid layer of clay, that requires quite some force to be scribed (nothing impossible, just my personal preference to work with clay that is still 'alive').
The drying times depend on thickness of your clay layer, temperature, current moon phase, ... so best thing to do is to try and see - when the clay is still very fresh, creating any precise shapes will be close to impossible - there will be too much of wet clay coming off - give it a few more minutes and you will be good to go for the rough fantasy/medieval stone structures.

For scribing I use a set of sculpting tools, but pretty much anything with a sharp edge will do - even a toothpick! Usually I create some sort of a grid to help me get the stones have a similar-ish size and then carry on with the most fun part - every single stone/brick needs to be scribed, usually more than once - first the rough shape of everything is scribed, then after the clay has dried a bit, I go around the second time to clean after myself, to make the edges sharper, add a detail or two here and there.

It's also pretty easy to glue another layer of clay on top of another one - just wait for the first one to dry completely, then add a new one.

An important note - you want to do this before you glue the individual walls together! You can do it all on a completed structure, it's just so much easier to do one wall at a time, not needing to worry about 'how to hold this, how do I get here'.

My next project for Frostgrave is a bigger house, or actually ruins of a bigger house and with me being currently not at home, I had to use every piece of cardboard I still had, so it wasn't a properly planned project - I just made one section of wall, then moved onto the next one.
The house is approximately 15 x 21 cm, the highest wall is close to 7 cm. I will need to glue some of the walls together and then I will move on to clay laying.

All the walls ready for stoning!

UAZ 469 Technical 1/72 MAC Model build log Pt. 2

What to do when you're not sure about your base paint?  Give it a day or two, reassess and probably repaint it!
I wasn't sure about the green from the start, but I kept on saying to myself that weathering will make it better.
And as I was done with all the weathering, the only thoughts I had were "why did I stick with this colour? It looks bad!" Yep, I pretty much hated it

It's a tiny car!

The important part here is that "day or two" - cause not everything is as bad or good as it initially seems.

After a good night's sleep, I took some more pictures, looked at them, looked again at the model and realized it looked pretty good -  the way I've planned - a battered, neglected technical.

So what did I do to the poor UAZ?

I started with a pin wash (agrax earthshade) followed by multiple dusty washes and pigments, Mig's faded olivegreen pigment and Vallejo Black Grey on a sponge for chipping.

The whole weathering part took me an hour or two - I skipped the colour fading with oil this time, mostly because I wanted it to be done fast. (another note here - it pays out not to hurry!).

So final thoughts?

Very nice little model, certainly not for an absolute beginner, but nothing crazy neither.

I will definitely build another one, this time with the grey/green camo shown on the box.

Next up is an AH-64A Apache from Italeri.

UAZ 469 Technical 1/72 MAC Model build log Pt. 1

Soon after discovering the Skirmish Sangin ruleset for modern Afghanistan skirmish battles I knew that I needed to get myself some Technicals. Luckily I discovered this lovely little kit from MAC Model.
It's a shortrun, so you have to expect some amount of cleaning and adjusting, but honestly, the model went together pretty well, with the only issues arising when the bodywork was put together - thicker super glue is your friend here.

The critical part of construction

The whole model took me just two evening sessions to complete, so a nice little project.
As a bonus, the sprues contain two types of weaponry - the advertised KPV 14,5 mm machine gun and also a 106mm gun, so if you're building this for gaming purposes you get two options in one.

The model comes with a tiny photo-etch sheet - some minor details on the outside - here I would probably welcome the dashboard, since the plastic one is a bit rough.

The tiny car is ready for painting!

Painting started with a layer of AMMO Black Primer followed by a mix of  US Olive Drab Post WW2 (Ammo 081), Dunkelgelb aus '44 (011) and IDF Sinai Grey (066) - a very odd mixture, but the only Ammo paints I have at the moment and I was lazy to clean the airbrush for Vallejos. The idea is to have an ex-Soviet, banged up car and even now, pre-weathering I like it.

Base color applied, onto weathering!

To be continued...