Fragile 60 year old Airfix Chicken Legs

The idea originally was to paint up just a couple of farm animals as scenery for some projects.

Enthusiasm got the better of me as I started to dig through a bunch of 20mm animals I had in a box and I ended up going over the top and started taking out more and more ... and ended up with this lot on the painting bench.

I decided it was also time to finally paint up some of my old treasured Airfix Farm Animals. BUT, my 60 year old Airfix chickens couldn't stand up to any kind of handling and their poor fragile skinny little brittle legs snapped right off.

A small fence kind of thing from the Imex Alamo Accessories set came in handy for the other legless chickens to roost on.

Wasn't just the Airfix chickens that started losing their legs, some of the Airfix pigs and sheep too. I managed to get most of the pigs onto stands, with some of them missing a few trotters. 

I'll try mounting the sheep on stands on another later painting spree sometime.

Progress so far, a mixture of Pegasus and Airfix animals, the sow with her piglets is a 1/87 Preiser hard plastic figure.

Some farm hands got painted too. Four of these are also about as old as the Airfix farm animlas, from the old Airfix wagon train set.

No much wargame potential in these figures, but they'll make nice scenic elements.

On the next post a new vehicle to complement the "Ersatz" Afrika Korps Refueling Tankers posted last month.

Till then, cheers, John

Stalingrad - Bolt Action Campaign in 1/72 scale - Workers' Village Scenario

A few pictures of a game some months ago with three good gaming buddies, Alex, Carlos and Juan where we gamed a trial scenario out from the Warlord Games Stalingrad Campaign book using Bolt Action rules.  

We played the game on the sand table and used a playing area according to the scenario of 4x4 foot.

The German objective is to clear the Workers' Village of Soviet Defenders. There's a dense collection of homes, fences, gardens, craters and rubble, making the advance extremely difficult for the German armoured kampfgruppen

The scenario called for a 5 turn game. 3 objectives on the Russian side of the table that the Germans have to control and allocates points that the players use to decide on the forces available before the game.

 There are Soviet tank-hunters potentially lurking behind every corner....

Carlos acted as umpire and chose the forces for both the Soviets and Germans.  

1 x T34, AT Team and 3 squads for the Soviet forces, and for the Germans 1 x StuG III, 1 x Pz IV Ausf B, 2 x Half-tracks and Panzergrenadiers, + Pak 38

Germans enter the village

Soviet defenders lurk in the ruins and burnt out cabins

Germans have it very difficult and Soviets halt the advance.

Vehicles burn as the Germans take more casualties

The game ended quickly, the Germans took a lot of casualties and faltered. Once they lost the StuG and the Panzergrenadiers it was practically impossible to achieve their objective, but being part of a campaign you need to know that some scenarios will be very difficult. 

The game was enjoyable and we're not too competitive so we had a good afternoon gaming. If the Germans had concentrated their attack from one entry-point instead of entering the table from various places they could have done better, but hindsight is always a wonderful thing.

Cheers, John

Ace Panhard AML90 and African General Paint Conversion

This old Airfix 1st version WW2 Afrika Korps officer, painted up with dark skin has taken on a new role as the Military leader of a small African emerging nation.

The figure is very old, 50-60 years old, but the polythene was surprisingly flexible so hopefully he won't suddenly break apart when he gets handled in a game.

The armourd car is a recent build too, an ACE Panhard AML-90

 Second post in two days, I'm on a roll here !  Cheers, John

Ersatz Luftwaffe WW2 Afrika Korps Refueling Tankers

To start off 2024 an update on something just finished.

These are a couple of repainted 3 euro toy trucks from "Ale-Hop" that we thought could vaguely pass for German airfield fuel trucks for a 1/72 scale WW2 North Africa wargame scenario with an LRDG raiding party

There are quite a few different models and it's not the first time we've used some of these in the past for other generic 1930`s - 40´s era trucks.

https://www.oneseventytwoscale.com/2020/05/ale-hop-toy-trucks-for-ww2.html

We do actually have a far superior Academy Opel Blitz kit that my mate Carlos has built and is awaiting a paintjob to join them as an objective for the SAS, but I still can't help feeling that these toy conversions have a particular charm of their own and won't look too out of place on the battlefield.

Happy New year to all, and will try to update the site with work in progress and games played on a more regular basis this year.

Cheers, John.