The Roaring Northerners are Dave Stewart, John Hill and Iain Robertson; a loose affiliation of tabletop wargamers and figure painters who inhabit the frozen and somewhat soggy wastelands of west central Scotland. Shadowy and secretive, they stoically quest to reduce the scale of the lead mountain that threatens to engulf them all, and perhaps even find the time for the occasional game...
....This is their story

Sunday, 1 March 2015

1970s Winter USAEUR- Sitrep

Unfortunately my headlong charge towards completing some vehicles for the 70’s US force hit a snag round about Christmas and has since ground to a halt….

Everything was going quite well initially, I fired through one of the super S-Models M551 Sheridans in jig time; it’s a lovely little model, although comments re: thin gun barrels and fiddly PE parts from the BRDM still apply.


I replaced the plastic .50 cal with a metal Elhiem one, which should be slightly sturdier, and finished the beast off with some stowage…



Then it was onto the painting of winter MERDC, the bit I’d been looking forward to. And damn did it look good





However, following this, the next stage was the application of gloss varnish ahead of the oil wash. And that’s when the wheels came off. Due to the cold temperatures, I’d decided to set up a spray booth in the loft, because I was too impatient to wait until the warmer weather to spray up the vehicles (after all the whole idea was to do this through the winter and keep up the inspiration for the theme. Seems to have been justified since I’m still waiting for warmer weather…!), and up until now it seemed to have worked. But this time, having allowed the varnish to dry, I found that the cold temperature had caused it to wrinkle and bubble the paint beneath it


The pictures don’t really show the full extent of how bad this looks. This left me with a coupe of options; 1) leave it as is and cover up the imperfections with weathering/stowage/ foliage/ cam net or 2) strip it all back and start again. I decided against the former, however I’d got so pissed off with what had happened that I couldn’t bring myself to start stripping it all back, so the tank has just sat on my work bench, silently judging me ever since. Looking at it now, I reckon I can probably try a local fix by just scraping/stripping the affected areas and just doing a touch up job, but that may well be very much trial and error…

In better news though, I did obtain a couple of Elhiem’s new dismounted US Cold War Tank crew. Although designed with the late 80s in mind, with a bit of judicious hacking and filing, they should suit my purpose admirably, and at least let me continue with this project until I pluck up the courage to restart that Sheridan!

Cheers
Iain

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