Pictures, Pictures



Tigers 009 (far left), 007 (center sticky note), and 314 (far right) as well as the Sherbrookes, who are [un]conveniently located in the shadow.



Tiger 007 with Sherbrookes in the background.

Well, the distance along the ground was accurate... can't say the same for the SHAPE of the ground, but still. Look at the next pic.

Looks cool. Could've sworn I got at least 1 picture from the Yeomanry's perspective where the rest of the scene was visible.

Sherbrookes and Wittmann's tiger. The tiger is looking and moving to the left of the shot, the Sherbrookes are aiming at the tiger. Not looking to good for Wittmann, is it?

Modeling Treads and My ant problems

In modelling, there are three types of treads that come with a kit: Rubber ones, solid ones, and chain ones.

Rubber ones make up most of my model tanks, and can be divided into 2 more catagories: Fix together and link together. Both are long, rubbery strips that resemble treads. Link together ones are rare, but are very straight forwards; they work like one of those tag rings, the ones you find on ski passes, except they only have one *click* thing, and are very rubbery and don't make a *click*. The fix together ones are annoying, they are composed of a rubber peg/hook thing at one end, and a hole at the other. The peg/hook thing goes into the hole, but is too shallow, and so one must glue/melt one end into the other. This is very annoying when one doesn't have immediate access to a melting thing, and the glue doesn't stick to the rubber.

The solid ones, I only have one of. They provide a lot more detail, and aren't very difficult, but are rare. They come in sections of treads, one piece for each straight section.

The third type, chain ones, are extremely rare, and consist of each tread being linked with a metal rod to the next one individually. Although this means that it can theoretically move its treads, I would not advise trying, as the would probably break. I have none of these.


So, onto my story:
I went outside this morning, trying to get a good picture of a squirrel sleeping on a shed. It got away before I got a good picture, but I discovered something else: the snow was almost done melting! I could finally set up my Michael Wittmann Diorama! But first, I had to put the rubber treads on all my tanks, all six of them.

So, I went to my modelling desk, and started gluing the treads into the right shae, as they are all rubber hook style treads. After gluing them all, I tried putting the first set onto a Tiger I. The first one went on easlily. The second one, however, didn't go so well: while gluing, I thought I saw an ant on my shirt looked down at it, saw nothing, but when I looked back up, I realized I had broken the glue between the ends of the treads.

That was very annoying; and I realized glue wouldn't be enough. At about that time, I realized that the Tiger I's treads are about the width of a staple.

After putting a staple around each hook-hole joint on each Tiger's treads, I tried to fit each them on their tanks. It worked well. And, the staples are barely visible, but did no immediate damage to the treads, so I could do it properly later with a melting thing.

While finishing my last tread on the last tank, I saw the ant again. But I learned! I finished putting the tread on, then looked down. I found a very confused ant, crawling on my shirt. Then I realized that I couldn't really kill the ant while it's on me. So I brushed it off, and thought about how I could punish it for making me mess up. I could drown it in glue, I could stab it with a modelling knife, I could put it into my ant-trap-killer-thing. But no, I ended up just squishing it and tossing it in the trash.

So now all I need to do is set up the diorama and take some pictures. I will probably also post my picture of the squirrel on my next post.

My Great Grandfather

My great grandfather was fighting as a Canadian in an entrenchment, facing a German defensive entrenchment, with a house between the two, in France. In the middle of the fight, the door opened, and a little girl stepped out. Both sides were surprised as the little girl started playing in the field between them, and held their fire. Eventually, my great grandfather got out of his trench, and brought the girl back inside. Apparently, the house was been owned by a French veteran of a previous war. The French vet. told my great grandfather that he was very thankful, but he had very little to offer; food was scarce, and they had pretty much no cash. So he offered a medal he won, and my great grandfather accepted it, and as he walked back to his lines, the Germans fired not a single shot, out of respect for what he did. The weirdest part is, that as unbelievable as it is, he somehow got a WWI French Army Medal, when he served during WWII with the Canadian Army.
And dad or Grampa, can you please verify that I got the details right? I don't want to take part in this story becoming an exagerated legend.

Guinea-tanks?

I mentioned before that my spray painting went horribly awry. But, I decided to turn my disfigured tanks into test subjects for later models; if I want to see if stabbing a needle through the plastic coating will look like any sort of battle damage, I can try it out on one of my test tanks. (By the way, if you take the needle out of one of those cheap poppies you can buy to pin on your shirt, and manage to stab it through a piece of plastic, it will look like a bullet hole. However, do not be surprised when the pin keeps on slipping off the plastic.)
I reached this decision when, as I mentioned in the previous post, the barrel snapped of my Jagdpanther. This wouldn't be so bad if the barrel had any means of being connected externally, but the model requires the barrel to be glued on to a piece inside of the hull which I already sealed together. Seeing as I could not fix it, I was faced with just throwing it out, or keeping it. I decided I didn't want to waste $30, and so I kept them, and realized later that they were my test models for the spray paint; I learned many things from those tanks about spray painting, like how difficult it is.

The Winter War

The Winter War, or Soviet-Finnish war, was a pre-WWII war, but not by far, only a couple years.

     The Soviets planned to have a coordinated assault involving Soviet armies advancing, Soviet bombers striking all Finnish airfields and shipyards, and the Finnish having an internal Communist uprising (yes, they planned on the Finnish citizens wanting to be communist).

     The Finnish realised they had a very low chance of surviving. Still, they planned and on putting up a big enough fight and slowing the Russians down enough to let some other countries join. They also built the Mannerheim line: a large series of excellently placed bunkers providing mutual support, with masses of artillery behind them. That, however, only covered the Southern front; but even the Russians realized that the Eastern front would be hard on its own, with mountains covering most of the terrain and few roads. The land pretty much defended itself, though Finnish ski troops and artillery probably helped, too.

     Initially, the Russians had 3 times the force of the Finnish, all in place to attack. The Soviets also had much, much more land and population.
     However, a lot went wrong for the Russians; the "advancing" Soviet armies got repelled by extremely well-placed Finnish bunkers and horrible Finnish terrain, the Soviet bombers called off their bomb strikes when cloud cover provided next to no visibility, and the Finnish, not surprisingly, had NO uprising.
     The Finnish held off the Soviets very well. On the Southern front, they held their positions, using the fact that the Soviets had 0 experience fighting a modern war, and still fought using wave tactics, and were easily stopped. On the Eastern front, the Finnish really got to show off. The Soviets had trouble using the roads, but still attempted to move massive forces around. The Finnish just used their ski troops to ambush Soviet lightly-armored vehicles and infantry, and had those ski troops direct artillery strikes on Soviet tanks, or anything they couldn't take out with a rifle. The first targets were field kitchens, whose importance the Russians realized too late: in the high arctic winter, a hot meal can mean life or death.
     After a while, the Finnish got a brave, they tried to, and almost succeeded in, encircling an entire Russian Army. Then, the Soviets got mad. They sent in masses of tank and men (not mice and men, though their tanks were fairly light...) in waves, sometimes reaching 5 waves per day in some places, with artillery barrages filling the space between, sometimes exceeding 300,000 shells per day (STALIN SMASH!!).
     The Russians eventually broke the Mannerheim line, and then renewed their initial offer for peace, on the same terms. The Finns agreed. Still, the Finnish lost a couple thousand men injured, captured, or missing, the Soviets lost ten times as many men killed, not to mention missing and captured.
     Throughout the whole war, some things never changed, such as the Finnish having good maps, and thus could use artillery accurately, the Russians were all but firing blindly. As you can probably imagine, the Finns also had better morale, until the Soviets broke the Mannerheim.

MORE info on my diorama?

From the start of my diorama, I had been thinking of stories for the people in it. However, it wasn't until recently I realized how I could do that. I typed up all my little bios, put them into text boxes on MS Word, and printed that. So here it is:

These two are in separate squads, but act as if they were in the same section; they think a lot alike, and have been through many battles together. The machine gunner occasionally acts as a spotter for the antitank rifleman. Both know they are better off together, with the machine gunner pinning down any infantry, allowing the antitank rifleman to get off accurate shots. Using this tactic, they made it through Kharkov, Rostov, and the 1^st battle of Kiev. They are currently split; the antitank rifleman wants to use the log for cover, but the machine gunner is concerned about what happened to the previous gunner who took cover there.

(The cover this references is a log with a DP machinegun and a helmet behind it.)

This man is a veteran, who fought during Kharkov, Moscow, and Stalingrad, and was recently pulled from the city fighting to take part in the pincer movement around Paulus’ Sixth Army. It is thought that he was mentally scarred from what he saw in Kharkov, and never wanted to fight in a city ever again, so a while after he arrived at Stalingrad, complaining endlessly to his CO, his CO had mercy and sent him off to the 24^th Army. He is now enjoying his ride; he grew up in a small town, and had never before rode on any vehicle, and ignoring his CO’s directions to dismount.

The two men behind the turret are friends who enlisted together, and during training, the man shooting distinguished himself as a good shot. He, however, worked best with his friend aiding him, so their COs decided to let them stay as a team throughout any reorganization. They fought in several small battles, until they joined a motor rifles unit in Kursk, where they met a tank crew, who were added to the list of units to stay together. That tank crew is the one featured in this diorama.

The two Soviet officers shown have very different stories. The one pointing and shouting is a veteran of Moscow, Kharkov, and Stalingrad, and served alongside the other man in this scene who did. He thus has great pity for him, and decided to let him rest on the tank. However, the officer running is a rookie, promoted to fill a spot, not for his skills. He is known throughout his platoon as an enthusiastic, courageous man, great at leading a charge into combat, but not so well at telling his men what to do, or showing any sort of discipline over his men.

Officially, the weapons-distribution in this squad is determined by rank. However, the men in this squad decided to redistribute their weapons to whoever seemed most fit for it. The man standing while hip-shooting the MG-42 is the strongest, so any other weapon on him was a waste. The man in the middle of throwing a grenade is the best thrower, but because he couldn’t carry enough grenades, the rest of the men are carrying some for him. The man shooting his StG-44 is a renowned shot; given perfectly equal weapons, he would be a perfect match for the sharpshooter on the Russian side. The man with the Panzerfaust is the fastest man on the team, and they gave him the Panzerfaust thinking that it would be easier for him to get close enough to the target. The man wearing the cap is the CO, and prefers to keep his issued weapon.

The "guy with the Panzerfaust" is outside the edge of the photo, but he does exist, and is running across the stream, unknowingly crossing the PaK-40's line of fire.

Having just woken up, the loader forgot that he had loaded a round into the gun the night before. The Commander is attempting to tell him this, but is having trouble talking over the T-34. So, you can see him multitasking: he is both trying to find the T-34 and push the loaders shell away.



Kharkov was a city in Western Russia, taken by the Germans. However, during the fight, the Germans got a bit overboard in trying to demoralize the Russians, involving a lot of dead Russian officers being mutilated, burned, and/or hung, and their bodies placed in places for all Russian forces to see. Needless to say, Russian morale was low.

Kursk was a battle involving many, many, Russian tanks fighting many, many, German Panzers. The Russians won, marking the first major German defeat.

Ctrl+Z! Undo spraypaint! NOOOOOO!!!!!

    I recently discovered that spraypainting models is not as easy as it sounds. The story starts 1 week back...
    Last weekend, my aunt said she would pay me & my brother $10 an hour if we helped her move furniture from her storage locker to her house. It ended up taking ~2.5 hours, but she was generous and paid us both $30. Sadly, I had already gone to HobbyHouse that weekend.
    So, I had to keep my money for a week. That didn't go as well as planned: I spent (on average) $2 on vending machines per day.
    But, when the next weekend came around, I got my allowance, $10, and was back to $30 for HobbyHouse. When I got there, I intended to get the first 3 models for "My Favorites" collection. However, I had trouble deciding, and before I could choose just 3, my dad suggested I buy some paint: PanzerGrau (Which I am in a serious shortage of) Spraypaint. So I got ANOTHER 1/76 Tiger I, a 1/76 JagdPanther, and the spraypaint. And that was all my $30.
    It started off bad. The 10th-ish piece I clipped off the sprue went flying, bounced 3 times (at least, 3 times I could hear), and landed in a place that remains unknown. I have it listed as MIA. But, I went on building (Jagdpanthers don't need all 24 roadwheels, 23 should work just as well, shouldn't it?). I finished the Tiger I with no trouble. But that's probably because I got so much practice with the first four...
    Anyways, when I got to the painting, things got much worse. I went out in my backyard to spraypaint, and started. However, the paint went on either too thickly, thinly, or unevenly.
    Recently, I decided to try scraping the paint off, and between a knife and some sandpaper I managed to remove quite a bit of paint. However, in the process I also accidentally severed the Jagdpanther's main gun barrel and machinegun barrel. However, that allowed me to also perfect any external glue drips.


You can't really see from this picture, but the supposedly flat color looks like camoflage.



My first 1/76 diorama is (almost) done!

As you probably inferred from the title, I have nearly completed my 1/76 diorama; my "Death of Michael Wittmann" diorama to be specific. (In case you don't know who/what Michael Wittmann is, google him. Tank ace of WWII.)
I am done constructing and painting 4 Tiger Is, 2 Sherman Mk.1s, and 1 Sherman Firefly Ic (even though the "c" is made redundant by me calling it a firefly, because, in the case of the sherman, adding a "c" to the designation made it a firefly.)
Now all I need to add is the scenery; for which plan on using my front yard (grass can grow 3 meters tall, can't it?) for which I need to wait for summer.