My small haul yesterday has started me off on a side project of modelling some table enhancements, the enthusiasm for which, I hope will last a bit longer than just this weekend :-)
First up is railway 'thingy' above. I have no idea what it is, but it was in the used section for a princely sum of £2. I quite liked the quirkiness of it and thought it would be a good addition to some of my WWII tactical games. The scale is OO, so it is 1/76, but will work fine with my 1/72. It is from the Dapol (ex-Airfix) catalogue.
EDIT - I have been advised by a poster on the Lead Adventure Forum (LAF) that this is a Prestwin Cement Wagon - thank you.
The chap in the shop did know what it was (obviously) and he said a couple of years ago while in France, he saw a row of these on a track, painted up light blue.
Anyway, I re-base coated it and did the top part as being in a seriously badly weathered condition (thank you Humbrol Weathering Powder ((Rust)) that I mixed with various brown paints).
I have rather a nice plastic (yet to be built) kit of an engine shed, so I think I will base that, put some rail track coming out from it and have this machine part in and part out of the shed for added interest. In my minds eye, it should look very good, but we shall see, so a lot of work before this gets to the table.
Next up - above, I have never seen this before, but it is a thick rubber type sheet that can be cut to shape with scissors and the idea is that it provides a fascia of wooden planking with supports to put against a wall. It comes in three sizes of board and I got the large size. It is available from ChoochEnterprises dot com.
Anyway, plan 'A' is that I build a redoubt type structure and use this to line the interior wall. I bought some rather strange looking balsa wood that has a bevelled 'D' face, which should provide the underlaying structure to the whole thing. So again, something that has quite a bit of work in front of it, but hopefully it should look good when done.
Now this is lovely (click to enlarge), though for it's size, a tad expensive, but there is a lot of material in it and a lot of work I imagine to make it. It is called Stony Mountain Ground and is produced by migjimenez dot com, costing £16.
It is just a 5" x 9" fibre mat with a load of goodness stuck to it, but wherever it sits on the battlefield, it will bring a lovely texture. It looks suitable for 1/72 and 28mm scales. There was only one in the shop, so a lucky drop on my part I felt.
At first, I thought I would shape this slightly and use any off-cuts on another model, but on further thinking, perhaps it may be better to have it sit within a slightly bigger feature of rough ground.
Finally (above), I took out a very plain MDF building from the bottom of my buildings crate and had a go at prepping it for basing and including it in a larger feature - you know, some wattle fencing and a snorty pig, type look. At first I tried to make some thatch for the roof using Woodland Scenics tall grasses and PVA ...... what a mess! I just managed to get it all off in time!
So I then got some acrylic modellers paste and plastered it around the sides and then applied it to the roof, using the palette knife to score down a thatch pattern of sorts. It looks okay and just needs embedding to a base, to 'settle' it into an appropriate background.
Oh and really, really finally, the shop had some MDF kits, one of which was a Guard Tower by Warcraddle Studios (£8), which I think is owned by Wayland Games. Anyway, it makes a futuristic tower with a defendable area on top and since 'another' project is to get some tactical sci-fi stuff going, then I thought the motto of 'get it while I see it' ensures that the scenario I have in my mind will get done.
This is intended to be a fun project with just a squad or two per side, so is just as likely to see the light of day as anything else I do :-)
I know my Quatre Bras boardgame, a new release from Hexasim will be with me in a few days, so my excitement levels are high and that is likely to be the next serious thing that I post on.
Resource Section:
You may be interested in COMMANDERS, my sister site, which is a bit more snippet based than here. LINK
https://commanders.simdif.com/
A photo page that shows the Pretswin Wagon. LINK
https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/brprestwin
