Strelets Streltsy

 

Strelets includes this little guy, or a mini like him, in all their soft plastic 1/72 figure sets, regardless of the actual subject matter of the set.

He's a member of the Streltsy, the Russian firearms troops from (I think) the 16th century up until the 18th (I think).

As you may have guessed, I don't actually know anything much about them, though I'm sure that Wikipedia could help, if I could be bothered to look.

He's been sitting on my painting desk for quite a few years, so I gave him a very quick speed-paint, just for the hell of it. 

Will I ever have a use for him? I kind of doubt it. 

Note: the paint-job looks kind of crappy in the main photo, but bear in mind that the figure is only about this size, as shown to the left. 

It's still kind of crappy, but not as crappy-looking. 

Glue For Soft Plastics

1/72 polyethylene cannon — Airfix in front, unknown manufacturer behind.

Selleys AllPlasticFix

The soft polyethylene plastics used by Airfix, Revell, and the like for their 1/72 figure ranges are notoriously terrible to glue. Almost nothing will bond with them, and up until relatively recently the only practical method of gluing pieces in that material together was to effectively encapsulate them with PVA or epoxy or the like.

However, a few years ago this product appeared on the market from Selleys: a two-stage primer and glue system which will attach one piece of polyethylene to another (or to other materials) without needing unsightly globs of gunk everywhere.

It comes with a felt pen primer, which is scrubbed over the area to be cemented, and which prepares the surfaces for the second stage, a clear viscous liquid cement. The joint grabs quite quickly — I usually allow about ten seconds, but depending on circumstance it could be anywhere from 2 to 30 seconds.

Once the glue sets, the join is very strong. I've done head-swaps on 1/72 figures using this stuff, and then shaken the figure violently by its head without getting any separation.

It's not amazingly cheap; here in New Zealand I pay about $NZ12 for a pack, but that's not a great deal more than a good quality cyanoacrylate in the same sort of quantity. It does seem to have a fairly limited shelf life once opened, so it would be a good idea to have your gluing project all set up and ready to go en masse, rather than relying on having the glue remain effective a month or two later.

Napoleonics II: The Revengening

These Strelets 1/72 Napoleonic British just arrived on my doorstep this morning, so that's the foot component of my Black Powder Brits taken care of. Still got to get horse and guns, but first things first.

I'm mounting them at six to a 40x40mm base, so each box is roughly one battalion, with a few spares.

In truth, I'm really more interested in the Peninsular War than the 100 Days period, but the only stovepipe-wearing cheap plastic 1/72 Brits I've found are one set from HaT, and though I like them as figures, there are fewer useful poses per box in the HaT set than in the Strelets boxes. I'll just have to live with the embarrassment of presenting grey trousers and Belgic shakos on the field of Talavera.

Later....

I had to go into town for another reason, so I stopped by our local model shop and picked up some packs of Italerei Napoleonics.

These are the 95th Rifles, the Greenjackets. They'll need their swords trimmed off all their rifles, as they seldom used them as bayonets.

Here we have the 11th Hussars

And these are the Scots Greys.

That'll see me sorted for cavalry for a while, though I don't have any lancers.

PSC 15mm Early War Germans

These just arrived for me today, a box of PSC's 15mm plastic German infantry for the first half of WWII.

On the box it says "138 figures and 6 models" — I'm not sure to what they refer when they say "models", unless maybe it's the 50mm mortar and anti-tank rifle teams which need to be assembled.

At about 22 quid (roughly forty KiwiBucks at the current rate of exchange) for in the region of 150 figures, they're not bad value. They're a lot cheaper than any metal alternative, as well as being substantially cheaper than Battlefront's plastic offerings in the same scale.

There are twelve sprues in the box, three with command and support personnel, and nine sprues of your regular grunts.

On each of the "grunt" sprues, you get eight riflemen in various poses armed with the Kar98, and two MG34 teams (gunner and loader), one standing, one prone.

The figures are somewhat soft of detail, as is common with injection-moulded plastic, but they're not too bad, and they're satisfyingly chunky compared with some of PSC's earlier offerings. The sculpting is decently round, taking into account the limitations of the medium, and they don't look as flat as some injection-moulded figures do (such as some of the figures from their companion set of early-war support weapons).

The "command" sprues give you a senior officer in a peaked cap, five junior officers and/or NCOs with MP40 submachine guns and other weapons, including one with what appears to be a signal pistol. It also contains components to assemble a 2-man 50mm mortar team, and a 2-man ATR team.






Overall, I like them. The sculpting is good, and there's a lot less multi-part assembly required than I've experienced with some of PSC's other sets, such as their late-war German grenadiers or their Soviet infantry. They look to me like they'll paint up well.

The weapon mix is more suitable for the latter part of the period they're intended for, as there are more MG teams available than would have been present in the campaigns in Poland or France, for example. However, they did soon start to bump up the number of MG34 per section, so I guess it's better to have them supplied than not.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with them.

Zvezda A13 Cruiser Mk.IV

Here's the first of the 1:100 scale A13 cruisers from Zvezda, painted up and ready for the wargames table.

It's definitely what I'd call tabletop quality, designed to be seen from a reasonable distance. The Dark Green #4 and Khaki Green #3 scheme is a bit more contrasty than it would have been in the flesh, since otherwise the camouflage pattern tends to merge into a single greenish blob. Likewise, the dry-brushing to bring out the lines and detail of the model is very contrasty, and for the same reason.

These little models aren't diorama quality, but for wargames miniatures they serve very well.

Front quarter

Rear quarter

Top view

Zvezda Cruiser Mk.IV A-13 (1:100) — a first look

I bought a troop of A-13 cruiser tanks for my 15mm BEF forces. The snap-together kits are by Zvezda, for their Art of Tactic game, and were sourced from PSC for about four quid each. They're moulded in a tan brown plastic — I've photographed them here after spraying them with Khaki Green #3 over a black primer.

As wargaming models go, they're really very good, especially considering their cheapness. There are a few issues to be aware of though:

• First, due to the construction of the turret, there's a fairly prominent seam running across the front plate that purists will probably want to address with filler. Whether I'm all that pure is yet to be decided.
• The headlight isn't moulded into its housing, so it will have to be painted in.
• There is no aerial mounting provided at all, so if one is desired it will have to be scratch-built or otherwise sourced.
• The 2pdr gun barrel is moulded extremely finely and looks to me as though it might be a bit fragile for the hurly-burly of wargaming; I will probably replace them at some stage with turned brass barrels, as I usually do with my resin models.

Aside from these fairly minor problems, they're excellent little models. I haven't checked them for absolute dimensional accuracy, but they don't look out of place next to my older resin/metal cruisers. I've glued lead slugs inside their guts to give them a little bit of weight, as the bare plastic models could easily blow away in a slight breeze. Although they really do snap together and stay together (Zvezda's tooling is excellent) I've glued everything just in case.

I'm pretty happy with them; they're really excellent value for money and provide a welcome reinforcement to my plucky BEF.

Minairons Panzer 1A (1:100)

Here's the diminutive 1:100 scale Panzer 1A from Minairons, alongside a couple of 15mm Battlefront Germans.

It's unlikely to do very well on any battlefield where there are actual tanks to fight, but as a mobile machine-gun pillbox it could be quite useful. I think that for 1940 I should probably be using the Panzer 1B or C, but they all look pretty similar and have pretty much identical stats, so this 1A can stand in for any of them.

They come five to a box; I got mine from The Plastic Soldier Company.

Starboard side

Front quarter

Rear quarter

Top

Sprue

Reinforcements for the BEF

Today's mail brought me a bunch of Zvezda kits (via PSC) to bolster my 1940 BEF forces.

There's a troop of A13 cruisers, and some air support at last — a Hawker Hurricane, a Bristol Blenheim, and in front, a Fairey Battle. Unfortunately the Blenheim is 1:200 scale, while the other two aircraft are 1:144, but for my wargaming purposes that's not too big a deal. I'd rather it was 1:144, but it will do the job.

....and for the Wehrmacht

The very next day, these arrived, also from PSC.

The Panzer 1 is by Minairons, and comes in a box of five. It's a quick and easy kit to assemble, but not without its issues.

• The hull back plate isn't shown clearly in the simple assembly instructions, and I'm not sure if I've got it the right way up. I'll have to take to the internet for a bit of research before I complete the rest.
• The turret has a peg that sits in a raised ring on the hull top, but it's not at all a tight fit, and if the model is bumped the turret will just fall off. I've removed that peg-mount, and magnetized the turret.

The 1:144 scale Messerschmitt is a BF109F, by Zvezda. I would have preferred a BF109E, but couldn't find one, so this will have to do.

Next to the Hurricane, the Me109 really does look tiny — which it was.

Little Plastic Army Men

I was trawling through AliExpress, actually looking for some board games, and came upon these little plastic miniatures.

They're not to a constant scale — or at least, not between different unit types. The AFVs, for example, look as though they scale with each other, and likewise the ships and the aircraft, but I haven't done any measuring to confirm that.

They're surprisingly detailed little miniatures. I assume they were originally intended as playing pieces for some board game or other, but I don't know that for sure. They appear to be WWII Italians.

I don't know what I'll do with them, but no doubt I'll think of something.

Transformers!

That silvery blob in the chassis is a slug of lead to give the plastic kit a bit of heft

Yet another distraction from the main thrust of my wargaming, I'm afraid.

I got a free box of Battlefront plastic Panthers and/or Jagdpanthers a while ago, when I subscribed to Wargames Illustrated. They're the wrong bit of WWII for my purposes, but they were the most attractive of the available subscription rewards, so they're what I chose.

There are sufficient bits to build five vehicles, either Panther Ausf. G or Jagdpanthers. Unless, that is, you have vast supplies of cheap rare-earth magnets from China. Which I have.

So, instead of submitting to The Man and being forced to choose between tanks and tank hunters, I'm having a go at magnetizing the hull tops to swap on to the five available hull bottoms and tracks. It's a bit of an involved process because there aren't really any locating lugs keeping the upper hulls in the right place, so the magnets will have to do that job, which means that magnet placement will need to be fairly accurate. I'm perfecting my process on this one set before going ahead and doing the other four.

I intend, eventually, to have a magnet at front and rear. I think I'll be making liberal use of epoxy putty to make stands for magnets to sit on, but really I'm just making this up as I go along.

I've now achieved my final form

Next day....

After a fair amount of faffing about, I hit upon a system that works well.

The first thing I did was to glue little stop-blocks where the hull fronts, top and bottom, meet. I used bits cut off the schürzen, which I wasn't planning on applying otherwise.

Rather than squishing epoxy putty around magnets inside, which didn't work all that well at all, I instead built little shelves for the magnets in the bottom hull out of plastic card and slathered them and their magnets in gobs of epoxy resin. Once they were cured, I covered the magnets in masking tape (to keep them free of the next lot of epoxy), put the upper-hull magnets on the bottom-hull magnets, and slathered them in gobs of epoxy. Then it was a simple matter of putting on the hull tops and turning everything upside down, letting the epoxy drool on to the inner hull-top to secure the magnets in the right place and orientation.

It's not a fantastically quick process, and it is quite profligate of magnets (six magnets per set of hull parts, plus two more for the Panther turret), but it's not unrealistically fiddly and lends itself quite well to production-lining.

Four more sets left to do.

And the next.....

All the hulls and turrets are now magnetized all up the wazoo, ready for final assembly and painting.

I've numbered the matching sets, just in case I got some attachment points out of whack, but as it turns out I've been accurate enough that everything is interchangeable with everything else. So, score!

Coda

I've got them all primed and numbered. I doubt that I'll get on to final painting any time soon; as I mentioned before, these vehicles are from quite different part of WWII than I'm primarily interested in. However, it's been an interesting and useful experience.

Zvezda 1:100 Panzer II

Battlefront on the left, Zvezda on the right.

 I just got an order of three Zvezda 1:100 scale Panzer II.

Just five pieces.

Six if you count the stupid flag.

It's a clip-together kit for their Art of Tactic game, and comes as just five pieces, so it's exceptionally quick and easy to slap together.

I bought them from Mighty Ape, and they cost about ten bucks each — that's just a little more expensive than they would have been from The Plastic Soldier Company, after postage had been added. However, after PSC got my hopes up, they dashed them when it turned out they had none in stock, so Mighty Ape it was — which had the advantage that the delivery time was a whole lot quicker.

Shown here alongside a Battlefront resin-and-metal model, you can see that it's perceptibly smaller. I don't know which one is more dimensionally accurate, and I don't much care since they're just gaming pieces and not part of a diorama; the relevance to me is that I probably won't want to be mixing them within the same unit.

Note: the Zvezda model is too small for 1:100 scale. It should be 48.1mm long; in fact it is only about 43mm. It looks like in that case Battlefront's model is about right, judging by eye.

The detail on the Battlefront model is much more pronounced than Zvezda's injection-moulded offering, but the limitations of metal casting means that the gun barrels and tracks are very much chunkier than they should be in scale; they're a lot finer on the plastic vehicle.

Adding a commander figure to the Zvezda kit would require quite a bit of surgery, since the hatches are moulded closed and the turret is pretty much a solid bit of plastic.

The Zvezda model sits much lower, and has a more convincing Panzer II silhouette

A few hours later.....

I got the three of them painted up and ready for the tabletop. I can't say they're my best work, but they'll do the job.

Marder III Ausf. H (15mm)

Port side

This is the other of the Marder options from the PSC 15mm Panzer 38t box, the Marder III Ausf. H with the PaK40 75mm anti-tank gun. This has been a favourite WWII vehicle of mine since childhood, when I built a 1:35 scale Tamiya kit of it.

The crew for this model are problematic, because the figures offered on the sprue that look like they might be meant to go along with the vehicle are kind of crappy — very flat poses, weird proportions, and they don't really seem to belong no matter where on the vehicle I place them. I'll leave it crewless for the moment and see if I can find something a bit better.

Starboard side

Front quarter view

Rear quarter view

Top view

Marder III Ausf. 139 (15mm)

Port side

Here's one of the options presented in the PSC 1:100 (15mm) Panzer 38t box set. It's a Marder III (Ausf.139), mounting the PaK 36(r), a captured Soviet 76.2mm gun re-chambered for the standard German 75mm anti-tank round.

As far as I know, the Marder SPAT conversions weren't produced until early in 1942, so being painted in grey would mean that this was one of the first to go into service, before the changeover to dunkelgelb as the base colour for German AFVs. There were about 350 built, in total.

I've used a new colour as the basic grey this time: VMA 72.128 Grey Violet, which is a warmer and slightly darker grey than VMA 71052 German Grey, and just a fraction lighter than my current favourite for Panzer Grey, VMC 866 Grey Green.

The construction instructions included with the kit are quite incomplete when it comes to this variant. I had to make a guess as to where some parts were meant to go after looking at some pictures on the internet. I think I got it pretty right.

Starboard side

Front quarter

Rear quarter

Top view

PzKfw III F Troop

Having got aeroplanes out of my system (for the moment), I've gone back and finished off this unit of Panzer III F tanks with their mighty 37mm door-knockers.

Or rather, mostly finished off, since as usual after taking a photograph I've noticed some bits that I've forgotten to paint.

These are 1:100 (15mm) models from The Plastic Soldier Company, and very nice they are too. If they have a fault, it is that, due to the way the tracks are moulded, they lack detail exactly where it's most needed — at front and rear of the tank, where they pass over the sprocket and idler wheels, and where they're most visible.

I've glued a slug of lead inside each one to give them a bit of weight, since otherwise they're so light a stray breeze could blow them off the table.

Me262 (1:144)

I finished off the old Revell 1:144 scale Me262 kit I started a few days ago.

As I suspected, the decals just crumbled when I tried to use them. I got a couple on to the wings in pieces, but ended up having to paint over them anyway as they were so ragged and cracked. Rather than mess around like that again, I just went straight in to painting for the fuselage markings.

I can't say that I recommend these Revell kits. They're pretty terrible, and require a considerable amount of work to make them look half-decent.

Next in the queue, a Panzer III

Starting on my 15mm Panzer III box o'goodies.

I originally intended to magnetize the gun barrels and turret bustles so that I could swap out the 37mm and 50mm guns, but that turned out to be more of a pain in the arse than I expected, so I'll just build 3 x 37mm and 2 x 50mm tanks.

I really like these little PSC kits. The only thing that would make them better would be if they included an extra turret body on the sprue 

Next day

The only thing I have against these injection-moulded plastic kits is that they're very light. That's not an issue if they're only intended for display, but for tabletop use I prefer them to have a little heft, to lessen the chances of being moved accidentally among other reasons such as an improved tactile feel in the hand — tanks are supposed to be massive things, so if you pick one up and it's light as a feather, there's a mental disconnect.

I made a little ingot mould out of plaster to cast lead weights in, designed to fit the hull cavity quite snugly. Each of these ingots weighs about 35 to 40 grams, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's enough to give the model quite a perceptible increase in mass.

The ingots are glued in place with 5-minute epoxy.

I originally intended to do this with lead bird-shot, but these days lead shot is surprisingly expensive — I guess, with the legislation against its use on environmental grounds, it's just not as commonly available as it used to be.

Zvezda Hanomag (1:100)

Zvezda Art of Tactic snap-fit models — still need a bit of trimming before painting.

I bought some armoured transportation for my 15mm WWII Germans in the shape of these snap-together kits from Zvezda of the SdKfz 251 B half-track.

They're fairly cheap, at about four quid each from PSC, and while rather simplified, they'll serve quite well as wargaming models.

They do snap together as advertised, with the exception of one point where the hull is supposed to clip to the mudguard piece under the engine compartment: that's an over-under arrangement with a peg that is supposed to hold the hull, mudguards and chassis all together, but try as I might I couldn't get the peg to go through the hole, and ended up just chopping it off and gluing the pieces. That's not a big deal, since I glued all the other joints as well, just in case.

Apart from that, my only problem with the kit is that the only machine-gun supplied is the AA MG that should be mounted at the rear, while the MG34 with gun-shield that should be mounted above the driver's head is absent. If I were more motivated I'd convert the AA MG, but I probably won't be bothered.

Something else I'd quite like is some seated passenger modules I could slip in and out to indicate whether the vehicle is loaded or not, but again, that's something I doubt I'll get around to.

Couple of days later...

Here they are, as complete as I care to make them. Completely crewless, alas, and I had to find some old decals since (as is fairly usual these days) they came with none.

They'll serve perfectly well as wargaming models, but I think, if I find I need any more, I'll try the PSC 5-pack next time.