1/300th afvs for the South African Border Wars

A recent post detailed my new South African Border Wars project.  Here's my initial batch of completed vehicles. 

They're all from Scotia Grendel.  I bought one of each just to see what they were like and I'm not disappointed in any way.  They're lovely models, just enough detail for the scale, well cast with little clean up needed and at a competitive price. 

First up the Angolan/Cubans.  As would be expected all these vehicles are of Soviet origin.  

Here we have the South Africans Defence Force (SADF) selection.  Scotia were the only manufacturer I found which did a comprehensive range of South African vehicles in any scale.  

These were easy to paint.  Everything was sprayed with Humbrol White, although I ran out and had to brush prime a few with Humbrol White enamel.  The Angolan/Cuban armour was painted in Vallejo Model Colour (VMC) Russian Green, then highlighted with Army Painter (AP) White added to the Russian Green.  They were than washed in AP Military Shader. 


The SADF armour was base coated in VMC US Field Drab. White was added to this for the highlight and then an AP Soft Tone wash was added.  I then painted all the tracks, wheels and some other details in AP Black.  I highlighted the tyres with VMC German Uniform and the tracks with a light VGC Boltgun Metal drybrush.  The windows in the vehicles were painted with Vallejo Air Luftwaffe Blue. 

All the vehicles apart from the two Elands (on the left side of the SADF photos) are based on 20x40mm 2mm thick MDF bases.  I pondered long and hard on how to base these but I had a lot of these size bases to hand as they are Warmaster standard and I also used then for my Sikh Wars cavalry.  They have worked brilliantly as they are big enough to fully protect the models including long tank cannons, without the need to touch the models at all.  They're also big enough to add some foliage.

I tried to represent the Namibian bush(South West Africa as it was) with the bases.  The bases were skimmed over with Vallejo Thick Mud paste.  They were then painted with Citadel Dheneb Stone and then drybrushed with patches of craft paint Yellow Ochre, VMC Green Ochre, Iraqui Sand, Dark Sand and Light Sand just to give contrast.  Finally I added some patches of Javis 2mm Autumn Grass and then some tiny pieces of different shades of home made foliage.  

This selection gives me a starting point from which to develop the forces.  One of the many benefits of micro armour is the cost savings.  Even if they had been available, it wouldn't have been financially feasible for me to have ordered "one of each" in any other scale.  All of these go into a video cassette  box with room for more which is also a great benefit of the scale.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City ruins scatter terrain

Image
2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul
Read more

28mm Victrix Late-Roman Archers and Slingers

Image
When I first embarked on my Late-Roman project a year or so ago, I bought a few sample sprues from Gripping Beast, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix.  The Victrix one was from the Late Roman Archers and Slingers set.  The quality of these convinced me to choose Victrix for the project and I duly ordered up some sets.  After working my way slowly through these I finally went back to this original frame.  These are absolutely lovely models.  There's loads of variety and they go together beautifully.  The instruction sheet which I got from the Victrix website makes a massive difference in this regard.  I really enjoyed working on these.  They were quick to assemble and quick to paint up being in a uniform of sorts.   I only have the one frame, but I took a couple of the bodies from some of the Dark Age Archers that I was working on at the same time ( here ) and added some spare arms to make another pair of staff slingers.  This worked pretty well adding variety to the poses.  I'll do
Read more

More 28mm Dark Age warriors

Image
As a bit of a palette cleanser while working my way through the 15mm Landsknechts, I started on a half dozen Victrix Dark Age Archers.   I'd completed a  first batch of these in January and it was good to get back to them.  The original intention was to use these as Norse warriors for my Ragnarok project.  Since then though I've been looking at making them more useable for a longer period of history.  Therefore, with the exception of the sword armed warrior who is very Viking, I've tried to make them quite generic.  As before nearly all the parts came from the Victrix Dark Age Archers set, with a few extras from the Victrix Viking sprue.  These were used to make the sword and seax armed figures.  There was the usual amputations and other bits of minor surgery to make things fit and that's all part of the fun with these plastic figures.  I followed the same process as before and methodically took notes of what parts I used for each figure.  This helped to make sure that
Read more