A Fujimi PzKfw IIIN belonging to 116^ Panzer Div 

Panzer Voran!

I have made a test re how to desplay few German tanks using hills. I have not detailed  the terrain a lot with extra grass and bush and so on but I was curious about the visual effect of seeing a few tanks crawling up and down low hills, although fairly basic.

We have a couple of Airfix StuG III, a couple of Airfix PzKfw IV and two Fujimi III.

How clear plasic can enhance your terrain

In searching the best way to make my terrain elements, ie trees, roads, bush, logs, grass, etc, looking the most realistic possible I think I may have found a very cheap and easy way, which satisfies me a great deal.

Thinking of minimizing the size of the support of the element, like a tree I just used a piece of those clear plastic sheet  that you find very easily in a stationery shop. It is also widely used as coversheet of powerpoint presentations, for those who handle this kind of ugly stuff, like myself.

You basically superglue that to the element and you may also kind of hide it by adding little details like stones or grass.

That can be applied also to almost anything which needs a base, like a fence or a little dry stone wall...

Then when it is the turn of roads I think the result is notable as you don't have that undesired effect of higher edges along the road but the latter fits and melds very well with the land around.

Some conversions of Allied vehicles into REME

I took an Airfix M3 Grant and converted into an M33 belonging to the RAOC HQ:

Thos is a widely used prime mover for artillery pieces

Then I took an Airfix Sherman and converted into an ARV using the Matador kit:

The figure is from AB

The following is  a M9 REME coming from an Airfix base upgraded with a Matador kit

And lastly we have here a M3 ARV1 also thanks to the Matador kit

The largest diorama/war game I have ever seen

Some 45 years ago a group of modellers set up a wargame club in Milano and rend a flat where they started playing huge games. As you may see from the pic the game occupied the floor of the whole flat and included sea,canals, rivers, villages and countryside of course. 

The pics were shown in an article of a weekly magazine published in Milano. The club was domiciliated in the same place, nearby the State University. I was 12 at the time and these pictures ignited my passion for modelling and war game. Although we are in the very early days of accurate models you may notice some fairly interesting stuff, not just too simple products.

Some of these seem the very wellknown Airfix produts, ie Sherman, Quad, M3, but the others seem well detailed and I have struggled since then to find out who were the manufacturer(s).

It is noticeable the almost total absence of figures, apart from very few, like the couple of Aifix soldiers (ex 8th Army box) looking for mines.

I also thought some vehicles could be 1:87 by Roco but they go along too well with the Airfix ones as there is not hardly any difference in terms of scale...

Probably some of the stuff, like the Landing Crafts  must have been scratch built.

They also used some tools, like the compass pictured here above, to calculate distances and the span of vehicles' hops.

Interestingly the leader or one of the leaders of the team of passionate people that realized all this wrote a book in Italian with their wargame rules. I still have a copy of the book which was probably published somethimes in the early 70s

This is a fairly simple conversion of the Airfix Austin K2 30cwt. I did not really feel I needed an ambulance in my wargame so I thought of making it a kind of command vehicle to support operations.

 

There is plenty of ref pics on the web so it has not been difficult to find original images or views of restored models living nowadays.

 

I assigned it to the 7th Armoured Div HQ (40)