Finished!: 15mm Sherman Crab Flail tanks

Hi folks,

My various bases and magnets arrived following my State of the Collection video's, which has allowed me to finish off the Sherman Crab's I had been working on:

I had previously 2 of these tanks painted, along with the command vehicle. I actually painted these quite a while ago (2014), so there was a bit of a difference in painting style over my recent vehicles. I decided, while painting the three new additions, to re-work the old models. This included re-visiting my basing.

I was really taken by Dave's slightly smaller bases, so picked up some narrower 2mm thick mdf bases from Warbases. These included holes cut in them for 5mm x 2mm magnets, which will save me adding magnetic sheeting to the underside of the bases. These also more securely attach the bases to the sheeting in the boxes. These tanks are on 90mm by 40mm bases, while the command tank is on a 60mm by 40mm base (as opposed to 63mm by 50mm Battlefront large bases I previously used). The extra 13mm's shaved off the sides just looks a bit neater. This also means the vehicles are a little easier to store.

Markings are for the 22nd Dragoons, although I think the turret numbers were a bit of a guess. I can't find anything substantial regarding the use of the numbers.

Dust effects have been applied over the front hull and tracks. Old vehicles were updated and brought to a similar standard, all the bases were updated. The canvas gun mantlet was added by me. Chain are from cheap costume jewellery. Fishing line aerials.

So five flails done, which will help with our large scenario games. The command tank I'm also not sure about, I think the structure of the squadron was several troops of 5 flails, with an HQ of three Shermans for each squadron.

Big thanks go to DaveD, who contributed to the upgraded troop!

Next plan...

Hi folks,

So not much in the way of painting done recently. I've been prepping models for my next couple of projects, going with both 'old' and 'new' ideas.

For the 'old' idea, I've built and prepped 9 Battlefront Humber VI Armoured Cars and 6 Humber Light Recon Cars. This has included sorting hatches, drilling out holes for radio aerials, adding stowage, etc. The only thing still to do before painting is drilling out and magnetising the turrets.

These models will make up the three combat platoons of my 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry squadron. This unit was the recon regiment of the 51st Highland Division. 'Famously', they were equipped with Daimler I Armoured Cars - but as it turns out, this happened from September 1944. So for the Operation Totalize period (August 44) they still had the Humbers. I sold the painted and unpainted Daimlers I had on to Martin, where they will become (I believe) Belgians A/C's which fought with the Paras.

For this force, I will also have some 6 pdr A/T guns, Mortars and Halftrack mounted MG Pioneer teams to add, but I am going to focus on the A/C's for now.

The other 'old' thing I'm working on are three more Sherman 'Crab' Flail Tanks. These will be added to the two other 22nd Dragoons Crabs I painted back in 2014, bringing the full troop up to the historic five Crabs. I like to see these on the table in the bigger games we play, so I wanted to expand the numbers a little to provide more options. As I did with the original two models, I added a 'green stuff' attempt at a canvas covered gun mantlet, as well as thinner costume jewellery chain for the flail drum (the stuff that comes with the model is just too thick. The thinner chain I used is still out of scale, but looks a lot better I think. My top tip if you plan on doing this is buy double the amount of costume jewellery you think you will need, as it never goes as far as you hope!).

The 'new' project is the DD tanks, both swimming and deployed. Two of the swimming DD's came painted, but I will be repainting to match the three I painted previously. The deployed DD's will be from one of the Canadian regiments that landed on Juno beach.

I'm not setting any sort of time scale expectation for these models. Hopefully once they get a base spray coat, the DD's should be fairly quick to do, though I am a bit stumped for basing on the deployed DD's. I want to keep to the same style as the rest of my army, but at the same time accept these things will be on a beach at some point.

The Armoured Cars I will try to do in batches of five, and I'll probably do the three Crabs at once. Although when it comes to highlights and such, the previously finished models will also get some work to try and bring them to the same standard.

So that's it for me. Tomorrow see's a 28mm ACW game played on a 6' by 17' table at the club in Billingham - our first time with this size of a layout, and playing with Martins growing 28mm ACW collection. Pictures should follow!

State of the collection 2017 - Part 1 - British/Polish/Canadian Armour

Hi folks,

So, having lived in this house for 9 or 10 months now, I finally got organised and had the old furniture which was filling the garage taken away. As a result, I now have a decent amount of space in the garage... more than enough to get my table up and get some pictures taken!

Normally I try to do a 'state of the collection' review around June time. But I'm sure you can forgive me for breaking from tradition and getting all the toys out!

Now, the issue this time was that even with the extensions put out on the table, I don't think the table is big enough to hold everything at once! I've plans to get some 2' by 5' boards for it, but in the mean time I decided to split my allied collection down into infantry, armour and artillery. This post will cover my armour!

The video I made (complete with a silent patch where the numpty that I am covered the mike with my thumb - giving more weight to the need to buy a decent tripod) can be found here:

But I know some of you won't want to listen to me whitter on (or not, while I cover the mike), so I thought some still images might be welcome.

C Squadron, 144RAC, 33rd Armoured Brigade with additional units from HQ Squadron (and some Churchill Crocs from 141RAC, 31st Tank Brigade)

Engineering and Croc support from 79th Armoured Division and 31st Tank Brigade

A Squadron, 24th Polish Lancers, 1st Polish Armoured Division. 

Supporting battery from 6th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, 2nd Canadian Corps. 

Spares! 

Thanks! Stay tuned for more!

Flames of War 15mm Sherman Flail Squadron (Completed)

After many months of having the last model in this unit sitting on the shelf, I finally made a move to get it painted (along with my Sherman Hybrids which are also nearing completion).

The result is I now have my two Sherman Flail 'Crab' tanks with the Sherman V command tank. The markings and decals were as accurate as I could find - Ludovic Fortin's "British Tanks in Normandy" shows the tanks without any squadron markings, and looking at some of the pictures of Flails I could find I couldn't see any standard markings (other than the turret numbers).

This book also details that during Totalise it was the 22nd Dragoons that supported the Highland Division (and as such, 144 RAC).

So, without further ado, here's the pics:

Lead 'gun' tank with spare tracks and chains... This is also one of the few tanks I have done with an extra machine gun - in this case one of the many spare Skytrex .30 cals I have.

1/72 Firefly vs 15mm Flames of War Flail

Finished! Sherman Crab Flails in 15mm

After far too many weeks of little progress I finally got the final touches done to my 15mm Flames of War British Sherman Crab Flail tanks!



Battlefront BR132 Sherman Crab - with alternative chains

I'm quite pleased with how the two of them have turned out, although I do really need to work on my weathering techniques.
Just to recap, when I first set out I used a 20mm (1:72) scale model as a base for how I thought a flail should look. I then tried to put this into 15mm scale. Here's a comparison with a 20mm model.

15mm Sherman Crab alongside 20mm Sherman I Hybrid Firefly

Sooo... the model I started looking at was this one:

Picture from http://rctlittlesoldiers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/sherman-flail-on-d-day.html - a fantastic blog and I only wish I could get my models to this standard! - I claim no ownership of the picture!

Alterations I have made to the basic FoW model (which looks like this):

Picture from the Flames of War website - again, I claim no ownership of the photo.

First I added the canvas cover around the gun mantlet (the cover between the turret and the main gun). I also added the storage box onto the back of the turret as it was missing from both the models. This came from some metal sprue parts I had laying around.

I added my own stowage, a mix of mine and Skytrex. I also was unhappy with the scale of the chains that came with the model (as seen above). So I purchased some costume jewellery with thinner chains and cut that up.

I did try weathering effect with pigments but failed miserably. I think I might use one of my as yet unused StuG models just to try out different effects.

Decals were care of Doms Decals.

Large (elongated) base came from Warbases who did a custom order for me for very little cash and with no issues.

Radio aerial is some 0.3mm fishing line painted black. I decided to do both of these tanks 'buttoned up' with no crew figures, as I guess sitting outside the tank might not be a good place to be when those drums start spinning!

I tried the yellow turret decals before realising they should have been red. Also these are pre basing.

Again, sorry for the poor lighting. One of the things still on my 'to be fixed' list. I still have the 'gun tank' Sherman for this platoon to do, and then it will be all done. Hopefully it doesn't take anywhere near as long.

The bases for these tanks were special orders from Warbases that were cheap and easy to order.

Sherman Crab Flail Work In Progress (Part III)

Onto part 3 of the series of Sherman Crab progress posts... At this stage, I have no idea how long the series will be!

Getting the basecoat on, blocking in the main colours and then using Army Painter Strong Tone on them left me with highlights to do and the dusty effect I have been aiming for.

I picked up some Vallejo pigments and set about making a mess of both models. Stupidly I was confident I would get the effect I wanted (or close to it) first time round. What a fool I am!

Next day, with a hot tap and a old toothbrush, I found myself scrubbing away.

Another few attempts with pigments, and I defaulted to using a drybrush. Another possible mistake at this point is that I've not applied decals yet. This may come back to be an issue later.

Still having issues with lighting for pictures. I also toned down the paint on the mantlet end of the gun barrel after looking at these pics.

Sherman Crab Flail Work In Progress (Part II)

Another quick update on my ongoing work on the Flail, specifically the section along the front boom.

I had previously painted the drum and chains black, so my first step was to tear up some of the foam used in the FoW blisters, dip one of the torn parts in black and dab along the front of the boom arms (where debris and explosions would damage the paint). I then repeated this with Russian Uniform Green (Vallejo Model Color 70924) over the drum and chains - making sure the black on the booms was also nice and patchy. 

This gave a suitably mottled appearance - the sections I couldn't get with the sponge I used a brush on, which also worked fine.

I then repeated the process with a small amount of Hull Red (Vallejo Model Color 70985) over the bottom of the boom arms and lightly over the chains.

Next up came some Model Air Metallic Black (Vallejo 71073) which I had picked up by accident years ago. Then some Game Color Gunmetal Metal (Vallejo 72054). All applied using the sponge method.

This is pre any washes, army painter or highlights.

Sherman Crab Flail Work In Progress

I've been a bit quiet blogging wise of late as I had hit a bit of a wall painting wise and had a visitor last week and a visit to my son last weekend. This week I decided to try and get rolling again, so picked up where I left off with my flail tanks.

These have been a bit challenging so far as I've fretted a lot over how to paint the drum and chains. I've spent a good bit of time trying to find colour pics, but nothing has come up other than other modellers tanks. This has had me dithering a bit as I have had to decide what I want to do with my own models.

One thing that has become obvious is that this tank (the Sherman Crab II) had some form of rear turret bin. While the rear hull bin came with the model, neither of the kits I got from Battlefront had anything for the turret.

I was just going to leave this, but had a spare section of metal sprue handy, so snipped it to shape and fitted it on.

As for the drum and chains (sounds like a band!) I decided that even if it had been painted, regular exposure to exploding mines and the action of the chains and dust on the metal would wear any paint away. I've gone for a coat of black and I will try some light metal colour and see how it looks from there...

Still got the track details to do and then a quick tidy of the models. The one in the picture above had suffered an altitude related accident (if fell off the table) and needed repaired - resulting in some metal showing through. The black patches are just a base before I repaint Russian Uniform green.

Sherman Flail turrets and this weeks painting

This week, I have been mostly painting gun and vehicle crews...

However, one of the things I've been thinking about recently while painting has been the addition of the canvas covers commonly seen around the gun mantlets of Sherman Flails in the NWE theater to my Sherman Crabs.

Example can be seen below (model by rct75001)

Picture from http://rctlittlesoldiers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/sherman-flail-on-d-day.html - a fantastic blog and I only wish I could get my models to this standard!

This has been an effect that's been pretty hard to get in 15mm. I've tried two different techniques so far, one using tissue soaked in PVA and water and the other using green stuff.

The first step was to remove the late model wide gun mantlet that I had used previously. It was too large to work under any sort of cover. Many of the pictures I had seen online had the flails with the earlier narrow style mantlet (as seen here).

In order to get the fitting right, I discovered I would need to file the Battlefront provided early mantlet down a bit to make it less prominent on the front of the tank.

My first attempts didn't look quite right...

Not quite right...

So with a bit of trimming and a few more squints at reference pictures I got to this:

Which seems a much closer fit than my first attempts! I also trimmed down the other version so the same sort of size as the green stuff one.

So that's the work in progress! Let me know what you think!

Sherman Crab chains in 15mm

Not a huge amount of progress modelling wise of late (mainly because of time away and then on my return playing Wargame: Airland Battle and Civilization V: Brave New World on the PC) but my trip to the club and the very nice things said about my painting and modelling work have got me rolling again. All be it to a slow start.

Here's a quick pic of where I'm at just now:

Sherman Crabs with alternative chain.

On Sunday I picked up a very very tacky bit of costume jewellery that had a suitable gold (coloured) chain. This was to use as the flail chains on my Sherman Crabs. I would add as well that I know of someone who added a great deal to the value of his models by chopping up some chain he found outside - only to discover it was actually a gold chain!

Top chain is the Battlefront one, the gold coloured one is the cheapo fake chain. The thinner chain is around 18 links per inch. I think I would have liked around 22 links per inch, although adding it to the model would no doubt have been much more difficult. 

Monday night was spent clipping the chain into lengths and then gluing the lengths to the drum on the tank. One of the most annoying jobs I've had so far. I think superglue gel would have been a much better substance for this. Normal superglue was too hard to control and made things stick in places and ways I didn't want. Gluing non rigid chain onto a rounded surface is no fun either. I tried to think of other ways to do this, but the best I could come up with was to use a file to file small lines in the drum where the chain was to attach.

I managed, after several hours, to get the chain the way I wanted it. This was the result:

Both Sherman Crabs.

Slightly out of focus close up.

I did run out of chain to do the inside of the drum, but picked some more up today. Hopefully another line of chain will be enough, and the spare can be used as stowage or details on other models. I might loop the chain around the top from the inside to give chain a little more bulk on the drum - but also as I figured that the chain whirls away from the tank so when it stopped chain would be still twirling around.

Anyway, that's progress so far. Next step will be sorting out the 4.2" mortars then everything can get primed.