A Tale of Two Sonderkraftfahrzeugen - Part I

Hello again to you all!  Ready for another action-packed post?  Well, this one should keep you going until I write one.  Boom boom!  Anyway, I'm taking a pause from my recent fluff posts to refocus on modelling.

Incidentally, if you're interested in the fluff I produce and are interested in making some of your own, I'd highly recommend my good pal Headologist's posts on the subject (especially for Marine players).  He very kindly gave me a shout in his post for people interested in Guard fluff, so I'm returning the favour by encouraging you to visit his as well.  Some really good guides for whiteshields and veteran sergeants alike on creating your own personal fluff.

With my 40K and War In South America armies both coming to a natural pause, I'm now looking again at my World War 2 project.  For those who haven't heard I'm doing a small force of the Latvian Legion after reading some good books on the subject of foreign troops serving the major powers in World War 2.  I'm doing some similar forces in the future for Indian soldiers in the British Army as well.

So, on to today's post!  I've recently invested in some of Warlord's Bolt Action range; specifically the Sdkfz 166 VW Schwimmwagen and the Sdkfz 222 Armoured Car.  They'll give me a chance to paint some historical vehicles, which I haven't done in a long time - so here's a rundown of construction and a quick review too.

Part I - Construction

The parts, straight out the box

No time constraints means lots of chance for conversion and a really detailed model.  I have no bitz to speak of for historicals, but I wanted to make plenty of stowage for them to represent their tattered appearance (my Latvian Legion is modelled based on the closing days of the war).

The models arrived as shown on the left - main body resin and metal accoutrements.  The construction involved a lot of flash removal and cleaning up, but both models were soon ready to go.

That was about the easiest part of construction - the rest soon devolved into a mess of pulling apart superglued bits and trying to reset them as I struggled to put them together, in particular the Schwimmwagen.  I understand Warlord are fixing this by steadily bringing out basic 'explosion diagram' instruction manuals.  That said, it was all built within about 20 minutes.  Reference material and real-life photos were invaluable for this stage.

After a GW White undercoat

Next up, I was ready to stash them with stowage.  I kept it down on the Schwimmwagen because:

• it's small
• it's already got lots of bits on it, with few flat spaces
• I can't find any real photos of kit stored on Schwimmwagens - probably too light.

So I took to the armoured car with some Green Stuff.  Have to say, Liquid Green Stuff was valuable here as I was able to give a light coat to all the kitrolls after I finger-pressed them into place to get rid of unsightly finger marks.

A bit closer in - you can see some of the stowage on
the armoured car (right)

I also used wire from posh wine bottles to make tow rope, stored fairly haphazardly across the back and sides.

I used for the first time Citadel Texture Paints here - have to say I'm very impressed with them.  I usually (like here) put mud on first then undercoat, repainting the mud brown as the last stage of painting.  I've discovered that the colour is so good it can just be painted on straight after painting for a realistic effect.  I'd say its biggest advantage is durability - unlike PVA sand it doesn't seem to flock.  Although, it's very expensive so doing loads of vehicles with it may not be viable.  So that's it for now!  Painting next ... the final scores for the review:

Invaluable!

• Price - 5/10.  Very expensive, but worth it for the range and quality.
• Delivery - 9/10.  Good price, very reliable and accountable and quick too.
• Quality - 8/10.  Exemplary detail and accuracy but let down by lots of flash, which led to inevitable mis-clippings/filings and some loss of detail to my clumsy sausage fingers.
• Construction - 7/10.  Difficult and fiddly, but some well-thought out flat joints means extreme tabletop durability.
• Overall - 8/10.  Some teething problems, but at the end of the day a lovely model.

I'll be painting over the next few days, so expect an update then.  Thanks again for reading and all your thoughts are of course welcome below!  Until next time!

The Colonel.