Elefant Zimmerit Test

I did my first Zimmerit:

I used plastic glue to make it.
Maybe I'll be able to post a tutorial tomorrow :)

Hope you like it!

Current build: Sd. Kfz. 184 Elefant

I bought this monster almost a year ago at the Expo "Inspiration Modellbau Mainz".
The kickoff for my purse was the massive fail to hunt down a russian IS2 with my Panzer IVs during the recent wargame.

Although this Trumpeter Kit already included a small set of Photoetched Brass, I bought a complete Set from PART during some e-shopping rampage.

I've already played around with some PE for the Ammo boxes in the Nashorn, but this was to be my first full PE set.

To be honest, half of the set is unused, since the parts don't show up on any reference pictures, are much to fiddly and on too exposed spots for wargaming or simply can't really be seen.

Here's what I've built:

Next up will be some Zimmerit, since an Elefant without it doesn't make much sense...

Hope you like it so far!

Recreated Grandpa's Warpicture...

Over at my home Wargaming forum, we had a "Recreate a Photo" competition which I participated in (and won  :-) )...

The objective was to pick a WWII picture of choice and try to recreate it as perfect as possible.
I went through the stash of my grandfathers wartime pictures and chose one that made him(and his comrades) particulary proud.
My grandfather was in Russia with the Heeresgruppe Nord, as a part of the schw.Art.Abt. (mot.) I./106 (Equipped with the 15cm schw. FH and 10,5cm le. FH), where he served as a radio operator first and then as a target calculator.

I don't know when or where exactly this picture was taken, but I recall my granpa telling me that they were requested to lay down supportive fire for advancing infantry which was held up by a KV-1. It was reported, that the first shot (across a considerable range) took the KV-1 out of action...

They were so proud of their accuracy that they went to the spot, marked the KV-1 with their units designation and took a series of five pictures, of which I picked this one:

It took me about 2 1/2 months of hard labour to get to this stage:

It was not allowed to edit the photo. We had to set the camera to black&white and needed to set up the correct lighting and angle without photoshop & co ;)
The KV-1 is a Trumpeter model, the figure is a modified one from the Lamercraft German Staff Officers set and the house was scratch built.

I hope you like it :)

Best regards,
Mojo

Sd. Kfz. 164 Nashorn

Few days ago I finished a model that survived quite some ramblings...
I started building the Revell Nashorn in 2011 but often got distracted by other projects.
For Christmas 2012 I received a big parcel with Revell models.Since they came 4 free, I decided to get some PE parts for them (1st time!).
And I bought some for the Nashorn as well: PART Ammunition lockers :)

So I started up again and prepared everything for the Paintjob. I always paint complex models before fully assembling them, so that I can reach every spot without trouble.
Shortly after basepainting the hull, my photo fell from the cupboard and landed on the poor Rhino which was grazing 1m below on my desk. Damage could have been worse, since the Photo was in it's soft case. The Photo itself was alright, but the Nashorn was a bit battered. All roadwheel wagons on the left side had a crack, part of the upper hull was broken and the lifting eyelet broke of. All could be fixed with Superglue.

However, this incident shrunk my motivation and the Nashorn was set to the heap once again. In April I finished the basic paint job and added the few decals. As I was about to attach the tracks I started getting nervous because I couldn't find one of the drive-wheels. 

Well it was on the carpet and it obviously got to know the wheels of my office chair :(

It had broken into many pieces and motivation was down again.

I contacted Revells department X (They take care of spare parts), but after two weeks they'd let me know that the Nashorn was currently OOP and therefore no Spare Parts were available. Down again. I plucked up my courage and asked for a Panzer IV drive-wheel and finally got one (Big thanks to Revell!!). Only to realize, that the Nashorn utilized Panzer III drive-wheels. Utter motivational drop.

Eventually i took a huge load of superglue and puzzled with the smithereens of the original drivewheel. An hours work and lots of curses later, I had reconstructed is as far as possible. Only one third of the inner sprocket wheel is missing.

I placed this part of the wheel in a manner that it's covert by the tracks. Looks good, but track assembly didn't work like a charm as you can surely imagine.

I really had my hard times with this one, but that's absolutely not because of the model itself. The kit is great and the result is sweet in my eyes if I may say this.

Have a look:

The Crew is from MMS and looks really fine. I did some conversions on them though:

 The gunner needed repositioned legs to fit his seat...

 And the commander now makes use of his Scherenfernrohr instead of his binocs. I also cut his arm off and placed it on the ammo cabinet (and attached it to his shoulder again )

Currently I'm working on a big project for a competition. I'm going to finish it by the end of the month. Looking forward to present it... :)


Welcome to the new followers!! Glad to have you here!

Best Regards,
Mojo

Another Halftrack done!

Long time no see, folks! Sorry again...

I already own a number of Sd. Kfz 251s, but still have 3 more in my shelf and another one rolling at me for a kit-review from revell (their new 251/16! :) ).
But it's as just as it is:

I got this sweetheart as a present from the shop-owner of www.fantasyladen.de at the Inspiration Modellbau expo in Mainz back in September '12.

It was obvious that it was built in a hurry before the show as a teaser for the new PSC-Packs, featuring lots of gaps and superglue.

I took it apart almost completely, fitted it and glued it back together. Afterwards I tried a "new" kind of camo-scheme. Finally got my ass down to the seat and my fingers off the computer-mouse and finished up the crew and the paintjob on the vehicle itself:

Hope you like it!

Ah, by the way: Welcome to all those shiny new followers :)
Glad to have you here, guys n gals!

Regards,
Mojo

Help funding a miniatures studio!

Hey all,
I hope this is not going to be the only post this month, but I have nothing ready to show yet.

But there's somebody else, who shows off pretty cool stuff:
Nadav Igra on his blog from the laboratory of a mad artist!

He's sculpting his own figure-range in 1/56 scale and currently runs an indiegogo-campaign!

I'd like to invite you to follow his blog and -if you like his work- help him fund a brand new miniatures studio!

Have a nice evening!
Cheers,
Mojo

Firestorm Armada rules 4 free

A few days ago I read that spartan games released the updated Rules as PDF download 4 free.
Visit their Blog for your very own copy :
http://www.spartangames.co.uk/firestorm-armada-rulebook-download

Though we were too lazy to print and read the new rules, we were eager to play a game again, so we got together for 7 hours on Sunday and used the old ruleset.
We made a few faults, for example playing 1000 Points for each of the 4 players and started playing acrosstthe long side of the table which resulted in 2 turns of approaching.

Still, it was a fun game, with Dindrenzi and Solyrians winning over Terrans and Relthoza.
A lot of critical hits were scored, often  resulting in a Distortion field,  making maneuvering even more tricky.

Looking forward to play the next game!