Pafetikbazerkas foray into 15mm Flames of War

With all the impending chaos of the last month I haven’t been as focused on this project and instead trying to get in as many games with folk while we can. But there has been some progress

So focusing my research on Shermans took me down a great many rabbit holes and I collected many screen shots of stowage and markings and almost settled on an historic unit to portray.

Turns out the 2^nd Armored Div’ (Hell on Wheels) saw pretty much every European theatre and from what I could find had all sorts of Shermans in all sorts of configurations and markings. The one thing I’m missing is an easy way of reproducing the 2^nd div unit markings as the decal set I have appears to cover the 4^th div. I decided instead to leave the unit insignia off, go a bit generic, but utilize what I had found to inspire stowage.

The tank sprues came with a few useful items including Jerry cans (Yes…he can), track, ammo boxes (I think) and spare wheels. The canvas rollups, felt a little off to me but I found if I cut them down they did pass as smaller rolls.

What I didn’t have that seemed to appear everywhere was lengths of timber, large canvas rollups that looked believable, boxes of stuff and back packs and sand bags bags

I had some square-ish profiled sprue lying about which served for boxes. A toothpick, BBQ skewer and a match or two gave some variety in lumber and split matchsticks work pretty well as planks.

I had a bit of kids Crayola modeling putty laying about so thought to see what I could make out of it.

Turns out its soft and squishy but not overly sticky and found it very good for making rolls of canvas and sand bags (ravioli). It does seem to take days to dry hard and there is a little shrinkage but the super glue still held it fast.

Focused pics of blue fin is really difficult apparently

I still needed a few individual backpacks to round out the effect and remembered I have squads of them and as long as the blue stuff was out I also pressed a few molds of jerry cans and track.

Currently I’m satisfied with about half my tanks and will aim to be satisfied with the remaining stowage sometime this weekend so I can finish painting and start weathering.