We’re approaching the end of the first month of the informal Flames of War painting challenge amongst my gaming buddies and visitors to this site. I haven’t completed a single unit yet, but I have painted and varnished a total of two Panzer IIIj (late) and three Panzer IV turrets. I need these turrets for the HQ and first Combat platoons of my DAK armored force.

This first shot shows the Panzer IV turrets, with the commander getting the long barreled IV F2. My DAK force represents units from the 15 Panzer division in North Africa, hence the single digit turret designations. I believe these digits are supposed to be a solid red too, but these were the only decals I had to hand.

Here’s the HQ IIIj late turrets. You can see the weathering effect I applied to these tanks has been softened by the subsequent ink washing and drybrushing to give a reasonably convincing effect in 15mm scale. Now I just have to paint up a couple of tank bodies before the end of this month to have completed the first unit for the three month challenge.

Incidentally the photos on this post were taken after reading Hyun’s excellent mini photography tutorial on Wee Toy Soldiers. I’m not saying they’re superb photos by any means (the figures are too dark), but I think his tutorial has definitely improved my mini photography skills. Certainly worth checking out.

I sculpted the first one of these 15mm Zeltbahn tent masters way back in late 2005 and they’ve been kicking around my garage since then. Although I’m supposed to be painting Panzers I felt like doing a little sculpting so finished off two variants of the original tent this week.

One of the variants open on the other side, and the other is sculpted in two parts to represent an open sided tent. The idea is to cut a couple of thin pieces of 0.8mm wires and use them as poles to support the open side. I’ve placed the masters down next to a base of Flames of War German Panzergrenadiers.

I plan to mold these over the weekend and then try a few resin casts and build up a custom objective for my DAK Germans. Right, now these are out of the way it’s back to painting!

For no particular reason I fancied picking up a Tiger 1E for my soon to be painted mid-war DAK force, unfortunately Vagabond in Auckland city (up the road from my place of work) had all the Tiger 1E’s in stock except the Tunisian model.

Fortunately one member of our gaming group has so many Flames of Wars figures, vehicles and entire armies that he’s usually pretty good to hit up for spare stuff. So I traded one of my 1930′s facades and a few resin Zeltbahn for one slightly used Tunisian Tiger 1E from the “Shop of Daniel”.

After stripping it with methylated spirits I took it apart and then pinned the tracks and barrel back on. I stuffed the housing ring a little getting the barrel off, but nothing a touch of green stuff won’t fix. The Tiger was apparently painted using Vallejo and I was surprised how easily it stripped off in meths. Typically I paint everything with Tamiya or Games Workshop acrylics and have always had to leave stripping pieces in overnight to soften these paint jobs. Not so with Vallejo, because after dumping the Tiger in, the paint almost immediately softened and could be rubbed off with a finger tip. A point worth remembering for the future I suppose.

As the Tiger has such a large nose-heavy turret I also broke out some rare earth magnets and dropped a couple into the turret and body and damned if they don’t work a treat! The turret isn’t at all floppy after magnetising and traverses very nicely and smoothly. I’m now considering using the rest of my rare earth magnets to do the same to my remaining Panzers and possibly my painted NZ Shermans and Stuarts. It takes a little more effort to do, and make very sure you glue the magnets in the right way, but damaged and lost turrets should be a thing of the past if I do all my tanks this way.

Update: Since writing this post I spent another hour going through all my other Panzers magnetising the turrets. Things went surprisingly quickly despite some annoying stuff ups along the way. Note: make sure you get ALL the magnets in ALL the turrets glued in place with the same polarity!