I had a rare moment of inspiration today. Why not repurpose the almost finished 1/600th Hawker Hurricanes from my stalled Finest Hour project as early Soviet Hurricane IIb fighters for my Arctic Eagles project. All I'd need to do is add some red star and number decals, then give them a matt varnish and it's a job done. I'll do some more Hurricanes in grey and green camouflage for later scenarios, but this will be a good start to the project and will save me quite a bit of time and effort.
It's so damp today that the bases that I block painted this morning on the 1/2400th French pre-dreadnought cruisers still haven't dried out, so to make up for lost time while I wait for them to dry, I started on the 1/72nd scale Maquette DH9a kit. This has been pretty straightforward so far but I've now hit another snag.
I've got to the point where the cockpit has been painted and washed, so I'm now stuck again until the paint dries properly, with the upper and lower wings, tailplane and engine cowling all cleaned up and sub-assembled. I'll just have to wait until tomorrow to get some more stuff done!
This bank holiday weekend I'm going to have a crack at painting up all of the armoured and protected cruisers for my French pre-dreadnought fleet, hopefully getting them finished by close of play on Monday. The scheme will be the same for all of them - black hulls, buff upper works and wooden decks - so a production line approach will work well, with only minor variations in the details. Allez les Bleus!
I'm almost finished with the preparation phase of the Red Actions! project, so thought I'd jump the gun and assemble the command group. I was going to make this a bit more involved but I think it's better on a simple 50mm round base with just the staff car and an officer figure. I'll make a signpost or similar to decorate the base but otherwise it's done and dusted.
A successful scenario run through at the club tonight, albeit slimmed down from six to four players. The tweaks I made to the original card deck worked very well and it ended up as planned in a big cut and thrust dogfight, with the 'experten' of 5./JG2 managing to shoot down three 129 Squadron Spitfires, for the loss of one Bf-109. I'll have another think about writing to the scenario up for the Lard Mag, as it's a really good multiplayer game.
I've decided to crack on with my naval painting project for this month, the 1/2400th scale French pre-dreadnought fleet c1900. This has been ready to go for a while now, so time to get it shifted as one of my projects on this year's 'to do' list, starting with the armoured and protected cruisers. I'll also wrap up the last of the Argentinian and Peruvian models for the South American project along the way.
That took a bit of time to do but the Royal Navy forces for Narvik and the River Plate, plus a few extras, have now been cleaned up and glued to wooden forks ready for painting. The bulk of the force is made up from the old Davco range, except for one I class destroyer and HMS Warspite, which are by Navwar. The Davco castings are a bit hit and miss but often better than Navwar for the smaller warships, with the opposite applying when it comes to the heavy units. I sneaked in the battleship HMS Rodney, plus some additional Southampton class light cruisers and J/K/N class destroyers, just because why not? I will paint these up as another Fleet in a Week project but I now want to get going with some other projects, so the Royal Navy will have to wait for a rainy weekend.
I've decided to use 1/600th scale models for the Bag the Hun scenario project, now re-named Arctic Eagles, starting off with the Soviet fighters. The advantage of 1/600th scale is that I can use my existing bases or make some arctic themed ones, while the painting process is much faster than 1/300th and the models much less expensive. On the downside, I'll have to do some conversion work on the Bf-109s for JG5, turning them from G6 to G2 variants by removing the cannon blisters and bomb racks, nothing major but a bit of a pain. I also don't have a model for the DB-3. I'll get started on the Soviet fighters as soon as I can squeeze them in to the schedule.
