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French Tanks…and a MKIII

Well I managed to get some paint onto the tracks of the French tanks tonight. I gave them a couple of coats of Basilicanum (or whatever it is called) Contrast paint…

I also managed to get the metalwork done on the chains on the back of the Char B’s.

I also managed to print my MkIII too. Yesterday I must have turned the knob as I pressed print and ended up with the LRDG set.

I have bothered photographing as it is a black (printed) MKIII, but it does look rather spiffy, on the allied tank front I was looking for the desert yellow for the French tank and came across this….

I will be able to spray the tanks with this, it might not be totally accurate, but it is better than the desert yellow.

Next thing on the tanks is to paint on the markings and possibly a roundel too….

As the dog had stolen my jam doughnut I thought I would add some Markings to them. I was going to do them in red or blue, but I am now thinking I would leave them in white for the second company with first and second platoon. If I want to be accurate (🤣🤣😂🤣) I will need to change the colour of one of the Char B’s to red or blue as there were only three of them per platoon.

On the car front, we are off to pick up a little runabout tomorrow evening, so by Friday we should have wheels again.

I have checked the piggy bank and I could get a DBA Samurai army from Tin Soldier that wouldn’t break the bank….hmmmm what to do!😱

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French Armour…and a troublesome MKIII

Well I didn’t get much painted tonight, in fact I only managed to put a wash on the French tanks.

Although it has dulled them down a bit, I think they look better than they did here…

I would have got more done, but I spent a good while just sitting looking at them trying to work out what was wrong. The front left Somua is the same one in both photos. The wash has certainly clobbered the light colour, but I am relatively happy with the result.

I put a light tone on all of the paintwork, this was ‘watered’ down with medium 50/50 but it was too subtle so I went for 75/25. Once this was dry I then hit the joints with a neat dark tone to give them a bit more depth.

Tomorrow I am going to hit the tracks with basilicanum grey Contrast paint. I am not sure how it is going to pan out straight over the sand colour but we shall see.

The one thing I noticed was that the newly Printed Char B turret is totally different to the rest 😱. To be honest I am just going to leave it as it differentiates it from the other Char B’s.

As for the troublesome MK III….

Here it (or possibly they) is/are…

The more astute of you will instantly be able to count up and realise that a there is more than one thing there and that the troublesome tank is missing it’s tracks.

As to why I now have a Chevy and two SAS jeeps is a bit beyond me. It may be the case that I either inadvertently moved the dial up an item when I clicked print, or possibly added these onto the slicer and forgot to change the name before saving… who knows.

It really isn’t a biggy, as I was going to print these sometime anyway. What I will do is reprint the weapons (apart from the Breda) as they were printed on the side, straight onto the bed. This means that one side is flat and the other 3D.

Tomorrow I will print the MK III (I hope)!

My good lady is still hale and hearty, Thank you everyone for their concern.I have managed to blag a lift tomorrow again and hope I can do so on Thursday and Friday too as it is a bloody long way to walk to work.

Posted on by maenoferren22 · 4 Comments

More Tanks

Tonight I managed to print a MKIII and a MKII as well as remembering to print the turret of the Char B.

I also managed to get some paint onto the French tanks…

I was going to use the airbrush for these, but in the end thought bollocks and got a brush out.

I looked at my paints and had a quick shufti at some French camouflage and then completely made this up.

Still got a fair bit to do, by fair, I mean loads…

Not sure how much I will get done tomorrow as I am reliant on lifts to get home so who knows what time I will return. I would like one more MKIII printed and then I think I will call it a day. Sadly however I found some SAS/LRDG vehicles which I just had to slice… I will be interested to see how they print. Basically I have done a couple of jeeps, a couple of cut down Chevy plus full sized Chevy too, not to mention a pile of armaments from a Bren, through a Breda and onto a Vickers.

hopefully tomorrow is a less stressful day. A big thank you to everyone for the kind comments.

Sadly my Samurai army will probably have to wait a couple of months, but at least I can ask for it for Christmas, on the other side of the coin, it means I can tackle the lead/plastic mountain and crack on with the shit loads I have part finished or not even started.

Off the top of my head:

Perry’s Hundred Years’ War French Infantry,

15mm FiW minis (cant actually remember what)

Flintloque cavalry, elf currasiers, dog Hussars and Witchlands Light Cavalry, not to mention various infantry sets

Finish my 15mm undead horde

Not to forget a shit load more 10mm stuff from Mongols, through fantasy and into the Sudan.

I really should start selling stuff I am never ever going to use

And actually play with some of the stuff I have painted!

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Axis Tank Update

By Axis please read German, Although it is the desert war, I haven’t got round to printing any Italian tanks yet.

So here we have two MkIII with long barrelled 50’s

Two 38T’s, a MKII and a 222

Two early Stug with short guns and a later Stug with the long barrel.

Already printed are two MkIII, two 38T’s and a MkIV, not to mention a Tiger and a panther. I am hopeful going to manage to do at least another couple of MKIII’s and another MKII. I will try and get some Italian armour for completeness and possibly a couple if Early Marder for open topped tank destroyers.

As you can see, the allied armour has had another spray, this time in white. I decided to redo them as I found a bottle of Iraqi sand paint. This is (in my mind) closer to the allied tank colours from the desert. Once the spray has cured I will get the airbrush out and blast them with the appropriate base colours.

A Churchill is being printed at the moment. Sadly I couldn’t find an early version. Compared to the other things printed this is huge.

Once the Games day is out of the way I will have a blast at Azazel’s Orctober with these.

It is a bit of a mix of metal and plastic LOTR stuff I have lying around.

I also want to buy the 15mm Samurai from Tin Soldier, but all of a sudden I got an email about these:

https://www.alternative-armies.com/collections/kitton

I am so going to have to get some!

Right off to check on the printer then time for more Cold and Flu plus!

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Tanks… Off He Goes Again… Maybe

Well the nice people from Creality came back to me again, asking for more photos and advice on what to do next. I unscrewed the power unit from frame and then the plastic cover from the power unit.laid it down and switched on the socket to check the voltage and voila… power to the whole machine.

Hurrah!

Checked all connections and they seemed fine.

Put everything back together again and the power went off again…

Booh!

Fiddled with the wires…power came back on again….

Hurrah….

Started printing something and all of a sudden loss of power again…

Boooh! (I said something like that)

Fiddled with a connector and the power came back on again…

I restarted the print and watched the connector… as soon as it moved, power went off. I therefore got a glass jar and blue tacked the connector to it.

It worked well, right up to the point the tension of the wires popped the blue tack off.

More blue tack later I managed to print a 38T. You can see the extra blue tack in the background.

This one took 2 hours 3 minutes to print…

I am printing another one now to see how it goes. I have contacted Creality again to let them know where things lie now. It looks like either a loose connection or a fractured wire, so I am keeping a close eye on things.

The other thing I managed to do was to spray the Allied tanks… apologies for the purists amongst you, I grabbed my Army Painter Desert Yellow and blasted them with it.

Originally I had only done the French tanks as I reckoned they had ‘interesting’ camouflage patterns and I could get away with it, then I thought bollocks, I only have a couple of weeks to paint them all and I don’t have a British paint colour, so they got a blast too.

I must remember to print off a new turret for the Char B now that things are limping along.

I am going to get the short barrelled Stug III sliced tonight ready for printing tomorrow… not to mention any other Axis tanks I can think of.

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Statues…Standing Silently

Well, as I can’t print anything, more on that later, I decided to paint something. The nearest thing to hand were the statues.

I bet you can’t tell which one was done with the lowest resolution 😉. To be honest I could have binned it but decided against it as it is a weathered stone statue. The photo was taken quite closely, but at a metre away the lines don’t really show that much. I will get a green wash around the bottom to show damp. I did consider covering some in creepers etc, but I am not so sure. In the past I have used string, died a shitty brown and soaked in PVA. This is draped over things and left to dry. Once dry ‘leaves’ are added. The problem is it can look either: ok, good or totally crap. Probably why I am not going to bother.

These statues came from Thingiverse for free, but as I have printed a fair bit from Terrain4Print, I decided to help him out through Patreon.

Still coughing my guts up, but thankfully not as much as yesterday.

Regarding the printer, as I said yesterday, I contacted the manufacturer through Amazon, they came back this morning asking for further information through photos or videos. I have sent these back to their technicians and we will have to see what they come back with.

Tomorrow I will probably spray the desert houses and make a start on them this weekend.

in a total change of direction (and doing my bit for Shetland Tourism) the Northern lights are out…

https://www.shetlandwebcams.com/cliff-cam-3/

Picking them up on the Sumburgh cliff cameras

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Random Stuff…Lizardmen

Not much done tonight… I am somewhat fatigued… didn’t get in until 19.00 so quite a long day…

Anyway tonight I worked on and pretty much finished the larger blue Lizardmen. The Leviadon blue is a bit dark so I did some dry brushing to lighten them up a bit (not that you can really see in the photo). The shoulder guards are actually bone coloured, but look metallic in this photo.

Tomorrow I will do the last two bases of the grey lizards. This weekend I am going to have to get going on desert war tanks as it is only a month (probably less) to the Games day and I still have loads to print and paint, not to mention building terrain etc.

The Orca were back round Shetland today, some amazing footage here…please be warned it does involve another seal hunt …https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2019/09/19/watch-as-seal-captured-on-video-being-flipped-into-air-by-orca/

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Random Stuff… Samurai (plus Textured Contrast Paint)

I have pretty much finished the Samurai, apart from all of the white I have noticed in the photo. I also repainted some white in on the lizards.

To be honest these were a joy to paint, a whole lot longer to do than the Aztecs or Conquistadors but still really easy to do especially with the Contrast Paint. As with the two other armies I am going for speed over excellence. That is not to say that I am not trying, but there is no shading or highlighting as I want to see how I get on without all of the extra bits – lazy…possibly but I am getting armies done in weeks rather than months or potentially years – possibly not at all.

Take the Aztecs, I bought them in February and never touched them I gave them a go with Contrast paint and that was them done, I purchased more and got the new lot done in just over a week.

As for textured paint –

Now, as you all probably know, Contrast Paint is a high pigment thin paint. Tonight I achieved the next iteration of the range. I am calling it Contrast Plus. It is textured contrast paint…

the reason being this…

My daughter very kindly gave me some of her home economics baking. It was indeed very nice, sadly a piece fell off straight into my pot of yellow paint. I think I pretty much fished it all out…only time will tell.

Today I spent two hours filling in a form to tell the Scottish Government that I had 4 pupils in my school’s nursery class. One of the questions wanted me to give an age of a pupil that wasn’t accurate based on the date of birth. The child was three plus seven months, however according to the dates they gave on the form she was actually meant to be four. By the end I was doubting my own ability to add up.

So I phoned up the support person who said that I really should fill it in based on the dates they gave, if I had done then it would have been inaccurate. In the end I filled it in my way, poor bloke, I must have phoned him up a half dozen times, luckily he was an ex colleague who knows I wasn’t just being an arse. The rest of the day was sorting out a school Website as we don’t have one…. ahh the dizzy heights of school management!

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Random Stuff… Samurai

A bit pooped tonight, so not much done.

I did however manage to get some paint onto the Samurai.

These are going to be as colourful as the Aztecs I reckon.

I was having a look at the HOTT lists and indeed, they have a Japanese Epic list. These are based on a legendary history, not to mention the films of Kurosawa.

Not exactly the most exciting list 😂….

Blades (Samurai)

Riders (mounted Samurai)

Shooters (err shooty Japanese types)

Hordes (Ashigsru or peasants) Personally I would have the Ashigaru as spears

Sneakers (Ninja – what else)

Lurkers (Ronin or Bandits)

I could fantasy-ise it by adding things like a Gashadokuro… basically a giant Skeleton who is made up of the bones of people who died of starvation or were unburied after a battle… not a nice chap, he bites the head of lone travellers and drinks their blood…

I could go for a unit if Oni = trolls or ogres (possibly demons), normally shown as being red.

Luckily Alternative Armies has a whole range of Japanese monsters in their Sengoku monster hunter range.

Thinking about it, and on a totally different note, I really should start printing and painting tanks for the Games Day in October!

I will make a start on them this weekend.

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Random Stuff…Day 2

As expected I only managed a smidge tonight due to Birthday shenanigans and a meeting with the parents at the school.

But at least I managed to get some painting done…

I pretty much finished the pack donkeys as well as throwing a bit more paint on the Samurai.

I really do enjoy painting the Tin Soldier miniatures… pretty much more than any other 15’s I have painted. I do like the style of them too. Once next month comes then I reckon an order will go in for the Samurai army. Still unsure whether to go early or late or get some extra bits to allow flexibility. Problem is I really like the warrior monks which kind of cements it into a time frame if I go historical. If however I go down the HOTT route then I can pretty much do what I like 😉

This was the thing that got me into Samurai gaming

I pretty much had all of these ‘ Standard Games’ wargames apart from the Dark Swords fantasy one. This one came out in 1984 so showing my age a bit 😂.

Then of course the Computer age came along and with it came Shogun – Total War. I played as every clan and became Daimyo in each case. I still have it… I wonder if it will work on my laptop🤔.

Weather has blown up again tonight, but there was a nice rainbow on the way to work this morning…

The land on the other side of the sea is where I am heading… unfortunately I have to drive about six miles to get to where can be seen.

Tomorrow I will crack on with painting some more things. But before I do I might look to see if I still have Samurai blades.. I know I have the Viking and Outremer ones… but the Samurai one would be cool to dust off and have a little play.