Now that the first piece of terrain for the WWII miniature game Flames of War has been completed, namely a tower from an old medieval town wall, construction could begin on the building the houses in the town behind the walls.

For my first house I chose another Kibri model found at a bargain price on the German eBay. I like Kibris kits since they usually are very quick to construct.

The kit has #8906 and depicts the old town hall in Maichingen, an old town in Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The real town hall was erected in 1540 and seems to have survived all the many wars in the area.

The cover art from Kibri above show the horribly bright plastic colours of the kit.

Looking at the kit, one the obvious advantages of the Kibri set is the fact the timberwork is already molded to the walls. saving a lot of work. The glass is already fitted to all the windows, making the construction quick.

I immediately began to weather the parts, first with two brown washes of brown and finally a drybrush with a light tan colour. This brought out the fine details of the woodwork and made the walls seem much older and more realistic.

The tiny bell tower seems like a casting miracle to me. The red part of the tower is cast in a single hollow piece and just need to have the white interior added as well as the roof.

The roof was already green, supposedly simulating a copper roof, but I painted it in my favorite aged copper colour, namely French Kaki from Lifecolor. With a light tan drybrush on top, it seems quite realistic to me.

Even though the building will be used for wargaming, I couldn’t help spicing it up a bit with some flowers in a pot inside the staircase.

Here is the almost completed staircase ready to be attached to the building.

And finally, the completed town hall in all its renaissance glory.

I painted the roofs in a brown colour to give the building some more variation. The drains on the corners of the buildings were left off since they problably would be damaged by wear and tear from wargaming.

As most HO scale kits, the Kibri town hall seems rather underscaled and thus fits very well with the Flames of War miniatures. I am looking forward to testing the new building on the battlefield soon

I have always enjoyed playing miniature wargames, from Epic Space Marine over Warhammer 40K to Warhammer Panzer Battles. So, ever since Flames of War came out, I wanted to try it. A friend and I have been planning on playing for some years now, and most of the miniatures are now bought.

But while we wait for our armies to be completed, I began to build the first piece of terrain for our games.

I have been building models in HO scale for many years and many of the kits available in that scale are rather small, often too small for the 1:87 of HO. Therefore they are just the right size for Flames of War, where the miniatures are in 1:100 scale.

I found the very nice kit of a German medieval gate tower on eBay at a good price. The original of the Kibri set, which has #8917, comes from a series of city walls from the town of Weil der Stadt in Baden-Württemberg, but in my opinion it could be located in several parts of Europe.

The kit is pretty straightforward to work with and has a very nice fit. I used a dark brown wash on most of the parts before assembling them and drybrushed many parts as well.

Here the staircase leading into the tower is almost complete. Notice the nice texture of the stone, which is very easy to work with.

After a couple of nights of assembly and painting, I mounted the tower on a wooden base, cut to fit. I then covered parts of the building in vines to give an impression of old age. The building on its base measures 44 cm, or 17½”.

Note the Flames of War M3 Lee in the gate. It fits just perfectly, and I think even a Tiger might be able to squeeze through.

I plan to make several similar pieces to simulate an old, broken city wall encircling an ancient town. That will look great on a FoW battlefield!

I left the roof of the tower unglued, so troops could be placed inside. Much to my pleasant surprise, two regular Flames of War bases fit inside just perfectly. 8-10 soldiers seems like a fitting number to occupy and defend the tower in a skirmish.

And the best part is that even though the roof is loose, it doesn’t show on the model. The old tower has a certain air of dignity, in my opinion, although the closeup shot reveals that some more washing might be needed in order to hide the last traces of glue…

A more modern shack was included in the kit, and might date from between the wars, thus underlining the newer usage of the old ruins.

The flowers comes from Noch, and are very handy to spice up the otherwise monotonous green.

The stairs leading to the battlements are covered with a tiled roof and underneath lots of firewood are waiting for the wintertime.

I am quite fond of my first terrain piece and am looking forward to the tanks of the coming battles thundering through the medieval gate. What do you think?

Some people are able to choose a scale for modelling, and stick to that scale year after year, continually exploring the possibilities.

Other people, like me, fall madly in love with a single scale for a while, and can’t bear the sight of any other modelling scales. This change between scales periods can be quite fruitful, since different scales allow for different types of models in a reasonable space.

Therefore, in order to be able to tell about all scales, OScaleModel.com will now be about all modelling scales, not just O scale.

The cars above reflect my movement between scales. In the center is a HO model of a German Volkswagen. I’ve been building in HO scale for many years and always enjoy the extremely varied model kits available. Older HO models, which tend to be rather small in scale fits well with my favorite wargame at the moment, Flames of War, so the possibilities are endless!

To the left is a 1:48, O scale, Tamiya model of a German Kübelwagen from WWII, more or less the same size car as the Volkswagen. O scale is very versatile since you can mix armour models with model railroad items as well as cars in 1:43 scale.

To the right is another Tamiya Kübelwagen, this time in 1:35 scale, which is a great scale for building all kinds of models related to WWII.

So, from now on, when reading articles on OScaleModel, look for the tag or category of the article to show you which scale the model is. Who knows, you might learn to appreciate the benefits of another scale!

Some time ago I experimented with weathering a locomotive for the first time. The locomotive, as seen above, was needed on my Castle Diorama to pull a short train of passenger carriages with tourists coming to visit the old castle.

The narrow gauge locomotive is very similar to the small tank locomotive I reviewed earlier, but has a longer roof and a tiny tender with coal and water to extend its operating range. Both models are made by Fleischmann in their unfortunately now discontinued range of Magic Train.

To make the locomotive come more allive, I found a figure online to crew the small engine. The figure comes from the great British Heroes of the Footplate series and has the number FC6.

I painted him in generic colours that I think would fit a 1920-setting.

The small tender was weathered like the rest of the locomotive with a number of dark gray washes where a lot of coal weathering powder was added on top to give the metal a deep matt tone.

I also replaced the gigantic original couplers with Kadee couplers instead, which looks much more true to scale. Looking at the image above, I suddenly realize that I forgot to paint the wheels, so there’s a job for tonight

The building in the background is the small railroad depot from  Busch.

After applying the coal powder to the locomotive, I added some chalk powder at the water tanks, simulating the calcite in the water accumulating due to the water spill.

A problem with using weathering powders is that the natural grease on your hands removes the effect after a while. Adding varnish on top of the weathering powder also removes most of it, so the solution seems to be to apply the powder and then not touch the models too much or use cotton gloves.

The weathering powders I use comes are made by Bragdon Enterprises and claims to contain pressure-sensitive glue mixing with the pigment, which sounds very advanced to be. Nonetheless, careful handling of the models after weathering is necessary.

It was a quick process applying this light weathering to the model and it looks so much better now without all the sparkling plastic. Next time I will use a heavier weathering on the lower part of the locomotive and perhaps apply more details to the model as well.

As the number of articles on OScaleModel.com slowly increases, it is becoming harder to get an overview. To make the site easier to navigate, I’ve created a page called Article Overview, that will constantly be updated to show all articles on the site, sorted by topic.

Read more at the Article Overview…

Continued from Castle Diorama VII – Grass, Moss and Ballast…

One of the last major remaining parts to be completed in my Castle Diorama was the half-timbered house in the courtyard.

It was the largest scratch-built house I’ve ever build and it took quite a while to complete from balsa wood, cork, plaster and various wooden strips, but today I finally finished it.

As described in part IV, I was inspired by David Macaulays great book Castle, which I read about a million times as a kid. The book tells about the construction of a great castle in Wales in the 13th century. A drawing in the book shows a halftimbered house where the lower floor is open to use as a stable, and I wanted to build as much of that house as I could fit into the castle diorama.

I began by cutting some heavy balsa beams (!) to support the weight of the house.

With different strips of wood, I began to construct the floor of the upper story, and always keeping some figures handy to check the dimensions of the half-timbered house.

After the completion of the floor, I moved on to to the timberframe of the upper story.

Building half-timbered houses seems to me to be easier than later types of buildings, since accuracy is not that important. If the frame turns out to be a bit uneven, it just looks realistic as most old real-world half-timbered house are uneven and slanting due to the warping of the wood.

During the whole construction process, the house was resting against the castle wall without any glue, so it could be removed whenever necessary.

I wanted the construction to resemble building a real half-timbered house, so after finishing the timbers, it was time to move on to the wattle and daub, which makes up the walls.

Instead of wattle between the timbers, I used a thin layer of cork from a table mat cut to fit. Again it wasn’t necessary to be very exact, as the cork would be covered later on.

Windows were made from wooden strips and glued into place.

After filling all the spaces between the timber frame, the model is beginning to resemble a house!

At this stage, I painted the whole thing a dark brown to simulate old and tarred wood.

In a real half-timbered house, the daub would have been made from materials such as clay, lime, sand, crushed stone, hair or straw, but in 1:48 scale a thick plaster mix with a bit of acrylic colour added would have to do the trick.

It worked out quite well, even though the paint and weathering of the wood needed some retouching to clean up the mess afterwards.

Here everything is cleaned up and the house looks as good as new. Then it was time for some more weathering.

After weathering the wood once more, I dry-fitted models inside the building to see what looked best. I wanted to create a scene where the person responsible for the old castle was despairing over the increasing amount of paperwork from the Weimar Republic.

I ended up not using the model with the coffee, in order to create the more simple scene, as you can see in the first image of the article. Do you think the room needs something more?

After removing the figures again, I began working on the attic, which I imagined was used for storage for various building materials etc.

When the floor of the attic was complete from strips of wood, I weathered it and added a barrel, a crate and some sacks from the excellent Cavern Accessory Mold #85 from Hirst Arts. It used the same mold for adding clutter to the dungeon, and it is great to buy a mold to keep casting from, instead of buying individual models.

I wondered for a long time about what to do with the roof, and finally decided to use another mold from Hirst Arts to cast a slate roof. The roof above is made from six square pieces and was then cut with a knife to fit the house.

I primed the roof with a flat black, and then added drybrushes of increasingly ligther shades of grey to achieve the dark-bluish slate look.  The textures of the cast were quite amazing and easy t drybrush, even though they might be better suited to 1:35 scale than 1:48.

The interior was then glued in place along with a plastic rod playing the role of a chimney pipe. The stove and basket comes from Paulo Miniaturen, the figure, table and chairs are from Preiser.

And here is the completed hafl-timbered house set against the wall of the old castle. On the right the new entrance to the dungeon below is visible, more about that later.

The consoles supporting the roof are casts from the same mold as the roof.

I am thinking about putting an old waggon wheel in the space under the building, but perhaps there should be something more? Perhaps a rotting old cart? Perhaps the castle administrator parks his brand new car here? Is that realistic at all in 1930? What do you think?

It has been a lot of fun scratchbuilding the half-timbered house. It has taken a long time, but the result is absolutely unique and I wouldn’t hesitate to build something even bigger the next time. It took perhaps twenty times as long to build this house compared to the half-timbered railroad depot kit from Busch, and it was two quite different but also satisfying experiences.

What do you think? What should be added to the scene?

Finding good models of old vehicles in 1:43 can be rather difficult. Once in a while I take a tour of eBay to see what people have on sale and search for vehicles from between the two World Wars.

Recently, I felt lucky to find a model of the Laurin & Klement 110, made by the Czech company Abrex.

The company Laurin & Klement was founded in 1895 in Bohemia, at that time a part of the monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In 1925, when the production of the Laurin & Klement 110 began, the dual monarchies had collapsed after the First World War and the company was now located in the republic of Czechoslovakia.

The Laurin & Klement 110, here without the back cover, was equipped with a four-stroke gasoline engine with an output of about 30 hp, giving the truck a maximum speed of about 80 km/h.

The model is quite detailed, with nice folds in the cover for the back and a wooden texture in the truck bed, which is really begging for some weathering.

The model measures 88 mm in total, or 3.78 meters in 1:43 scale. The wheelbase is 69 mm.

The model comes apart quite easily by loosening two screws at the bottom. The model is quite versatile and includes part for both a truck and a limousine. I prefer the truck as it seems wonderfully old-fashioned, but let’s have a look at the limousine as well.

Suddenly a completely different model appears!

It seems quite ingenious of Abrex to design a model that easily can be altered from one type to the other. I doubt if the original car could do the same, but it seems to work here.

In this configuration, it is much easier to enjoy the very well detailed interior at the front seats. Note the small dials, the imitated leather of the steering wheel as well as the three pedals. The horn with the orange bulb is a nice touch as well.

Taking a closer look at the radiator of the model gives some more information to its year of origin. The Laurin & Klement 110 went into production in 1925 and in the same year the Laurin & Klement was taken over by a company then known as Akciova Spolecnot, today better known as Škoda Auto.

With the inclusion of the Škoda logo on top, the car is most likely not from 1925 which corresponds with the information on Abrex’ website claiming the vehicle is from 1927.

A nice overview of the history of both Laurin & Klement and Škoda Auto is available at the Unique Cars and Parts website.

I am quite fond of my new combined truck and limousine. Open topped cars from the years between the World Wars seem to be in ample supply, but small trucks are quite rare, so I will keep the model in this version.

If you come across other nice truck models from especially the 1920’s, please don’t hesitate to drop a line or a link in a comment. Thanks

In 1916, a new and fearsome weapon was on the way to break the dreadful stalemate of the trenches of First World War. A secret Britsh War Office Order read:

“Volunteers are required for an exceedingly dangerous and hazardous duty of a secret nature. Officers who have been awarded decorations for bravery, and are experienced in the handling of men, and with an engineering background, should have their names submitted for this office.”

The dangerous duty was of course handling the brand new land ironclad, the jabberwock with eyes of flame or simply tank as it later became known to the world.

These men that answered the call are the subjects of Robert Kershaws book Tank Men from 2008.

A huge number of books focus on the fighting machines themselves, their armor, their guns and  engines. This book takes another perspective, instead focusing on the crews of the steel beasts and the comradeships and social levelling emerging from the use of this new weapon.

Tank Men begins its tale in the First World War with the development of the first British tanks and progresses through the period between the world war, before settling in the the main focus of the book, World War II.

The chronological perspective works very well and highlights some very interesting differences about the tank research and production of the great powers.

These differences became clearly visible in the first years of World War II. The most sophisticated and largest tank force belonged to France in 1939. In many ways the tanks were ahead of time with lots of armour, powerful main guns and a relatively good mobility.

Despite this, the French armour were easily defeated by the fast-moving German forces in 1940. Besides employing superior tactics, the Germans had given a lot of thought to the human factor of tank warfare. They had carefully examined the functions of each crewmember and had designed the tanks so the humans inside could carry out their duties as effectively as possible, and that payed off.

Kershaw argues quite convincingly for this and several other points, which makes the book a pleasure to read. The author has served in several modern wars and in NATO and has so far written six books about military history.

As you can see above, the book is filled with a number of interesting quotes from former tankmen of many nations, and it gives the book a freshness and a feeling of being close to the action.

Especially in the end of the book which corresponds to the end of World War II in Europe the reader feels the nervousness of the tank crew who know the war will end in days, leading to a very slow and careful march forward.

I very much enjoyed reading the book, in particular the chapters about the early war and the war in North Africa, where crews and equipment were tested in an enviroment perfectly suited to tank warfare.

Being a paperback it is also quite inexpensive at £9, which was more or less what I payed for it in a bookshop in Copenhagen. I’ll give the book a warm recommendation, as it was an easy and interesting read, which was hard to let go when worldly matters required my attention.

Can you recommend other good book on armoured warfare for further modelling inspiration?

I’ve always preferred building common vehicles rather than rare experimental vehicles. With that in mind, the US M4 Sherman tank seemed like a logical choice for my first attempt at building an Allied tank from WWII.

US troops from the 60th Infantry Regiment advance into a Belgian town under the protection of a M4 Sherman tank, September 9, 1944.

Besides the Soviet T34, the US M4 Sherman was the most numerous produced tank during WWII with more than 50.000 units produced.

The M4 tank, nicknamed Sherman by the British which gained widespread use, first saw action in the British 8th Army in the second battle of El Alamain in Egypt. It immediately proved its worth against German Panzer IIIs and short-barreled Panzer IVs.

The first US use of the M4 Sherman in battle was only a month later in November 1942 in Operation Torch. In both actions the M4A1 type was the first type to be used, and it is this type of Sherman Tamiya has chosen as a basis for its kit #32523 in 1:48 scale.

Crew from the tank “Eternity” check their vehicle after landing at Red Beach 2, Sicily on July 10th 1943.

The M4A1 differed from the other versions of the Sherman by having a distinctively rounded cast hull, as seen on the image above. More than 6,000 M4A1’s were produced from February 1942 to December 1943 and the type continued to serve throughout the war.

The model comes with a die-cast lower hull. I’ve heard several modellers complain about this, but I like the fact that it adds weight to the vehicle. When I build plastic kits, I usually add some kind of metal somewhere unseen, and the cast hull of this kit removes the need to glue in coins.

The turret was quite easy to build aside from the gun, which needed some putty to fill out the seam between the front part and the long barrel. (Pardon the wrong white balance in the photo, which makes the plastic seem brown.)

The assembled turret with 75mm M3 cannon and M2 Heavy Machine Gun. The kit is made from an olive drab plastic, perhaps so it can be used without paint??

The rounded cast upper hull is a single piece, that just needs to be detailed with a number of different parts.

One disadvantage of the diecast lower hull is that normal plastic glue does not work and stronger glues are needed, but I experienced no problems with it during the construction phase.

After assembling everything, it was time to visit the spray booth. I usually use colour from a spray can for undercoating the models as it creates a strong layer for adding weathering and decals on.

After the spray paint, I added the tracks, which I had sprayed flat black before assembling them. Tracks of armoured vehicles used to be quite dreadful in my days of modelling 1:72 tanks. The tracks were often made from rubber, that often broke apart and had difficulty accepting paint.

The tracks on the Tamiya Sherman were injected plastic like the rest of the kit and reminded me of assembling my tanks from Games Workshop for my Imperial Guard army in my younger days. It was very easy and produced a perfectly acceptably result.

Decals were then added and the whole vehicle was given a layer of dullcoat to protect the markings.

After painting the details and highlighting the tank with a light green, the whole model was given some weathering withchalk powder, simulating a dusty summers day.

According to the instructions in the kit, this particular tank is from the 7th Armored Division in France in the summer of 1944.

After putting on the decal, coasting the model and during weathering, I noticed that the star in the front of the vehicle wasn’t positioned exactly right. I read earlier that some crews painted out the stars in order to improve the camouflage of the vehicle, so perhaps I should do that too?

On the other hand, I think that the vehicle looks a bit boring with the few details included in the kit. So I looked around the internet and found the Polish company Adalbertus, who had a nice set of sandbag armour for this kit available. It seems like it will cover the wrong mark completely.

Until it arrives from Poland, I’ll just have to do with photographic tricks to cover up my mistake.

What do you think of the kit?

Continued from Castle Diorama VI -- Reaching the Top…

After looking at white plaster and white styrofoam for a long time, it is quite a pleasure to add colour and texture to the castle diorama.

After finishing construction and giving the castle walls a basic paintjob, I painted the rocks of the cliff a dark grey, meaning to add a number of highlights later.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dH_tiWVKjY

I normally use sifted dried dirt for ballasting the track, but this time I had found a bag of coarse sand in a pet shop that seemed to be just the right size for O scale ballast.

I used a large brush to position the ballast between the sleepers as you can see in the video above. After that I used a fine brush to remove the last ballast from the sleepers.

Then I used a syringe to spread a mix of glue, brown paint as well a a drop of dishwasher fluid. The colour of the mix seems somewhat purple in the video, but that’s just the white balance of my iPhone that doesn’t work too well.

As the glue dried I sprinkled a bit of green flock at the edges of the track bed. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the colour of the ballast, so I decided to use some chalk weathering powder later.

Looking through the cut in the cliff towards the small halt from Busch. The track is a single piece of flextrack from Peco, which was quite easy to work into a nice curve.

My original plan for the small halt was just to have a small platform there with a bit of forest behind it. But when I saw the new small depot building kit, I immediately knew it would fit right in.

Fitting the large platform in required a bit of groundwork, and as you can see in the picture I created the ground from whatever scrap material I had lying around. Everything would be covered in dirt anyway and later in tall scale grass.

To get some variation in the scale grass, I mixed a number of long and short types of static grass in various colours. I then used a Heki Flockstar which is an electrostatic device similar to a Noch Grassmaster to get the grass to stand upright.

The two small fields above have just been planted with the mix of static grasses. In my opinion you get the best result if you keep the various colours seperate before sowing. When adding grass to the electrostatic device add the colours one after the other so there will be patches of various colours on the field. The effect should be visible above.

I am trying to give the expression of a dry summers day, so quite a lot of yellow grass was added.

Inspired by one of my favorite model railroad forums, The Whistle Post, which was running a photo contest the agriculture as the them, I decided to add a fence to one of the fields to keep farm animals inside.

The wooden fence posts were painted brown, shaded black and drybrushed with a medium grey to look like worn weatherbeaten wood. After painting, the post were pushed into the soft polystyrene along with a bit of white glue.

The string was then glued to the post with superglue.

The rocks were painted grey, shaded with a darker grey and then highlighted with first light grey, beige and finally a bit of white colour.

Then I added a mixture of moss in various green and brown colours to the vertical surfaces of the cliff and sowed more static grass as described above on the horisontal surfaces.

So far, so good. The diorama is resting on our sofa after a long day’s work.

Next up is adding a large tree near the road, plating more bushes and vines, especially at the castle wall to break up the monotony of the fieldstones. More weeds are needed at the top of the ruined tower, and some of the rock casts will be covered in bushes for a more realistic look.

The halt needs more detailing and the track should be somewhat more overgrown.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Continues in Castle Diorama VIII -- Half-Timbered House…