Sidetracked - Cold War Miniatures.

I have been going through my Cold War miniatures again. This was one of the last projects I was working on and talking to Brian English about before he passed away. It is hard to believe that it has been 18 months already. I visited his widow over the weekend and was trying to help her with Brian's hobby stuff. She graciously gave me a bin of his Cold War miniatures and some of his Dark Ages stuff. Both things we had either gamed together or talked extensively about. I am very greatful for the gift.

One thing that surprised me was how much stuff that he had that was painted. He must have sent them out to be painted and got them back without ever unwrapping them from the painter. What I unwrapped was a big surprise.

Lets start with the Warsaw Pact forces. There was a large number of painted infantry. I am not sure which nation they belong to. There were a few miniature with fur hats. But there were light machine gunners with a top loading magazine fed weapon that to me looked like a Bren gun. based on this, I think they are Czechoslovakian troops as they carried the ZB vz 26/52/57 that look like they would be a good match for this weapon. However, the images on the Team Yankee website show the uniforms as much lighter than what I have. They could be Cuban as they also used the Czech weapon in their military. For now, they will be treated as a generic Eastern Bloc force.

There are 8x RPG-7 wielding guys, a general officer with a host of medals, a dismounted tanker, three pistol wielding junior officers, 24x AK47 wielding troops (some may have RPKs but I didn't look closely), 1x fur hatted AK wielding fellows, 1x fur hatted Bren gunner (easier to write than the Czech weapon) 2x fur hatted NCO/Offier types, 8x dead troops (with greusome paint jobs), 3x prone light machine gunners, three steel helmeted bren gunners.

These troops are really nice. I am looking forward to gaming with them. There are some minor touch ups needed on some helmets but look great. There was some kind of support vehicle that had some equipment/rails on top that had broken. I need to determine what that was supposed to look like to fix it. I just haven't been able to identify it.

In addition to these, there were a number of tanks. This really stretched my recognition skills. I have determined that they are T-62 tanksand a ZSU-23-4 anti-aircraft vehicle. I have wanted one of these for a long time. I wanted them for my Syrians for Lebanon 82, but this is a very welcome addition. The tanks had bent barrels from travel and most of the paint chipped off those bends. The ZSU required some straightening as well but was not as bad as I had feared. I have more than enough T-62s at this point. What is nice is I have a mix of hatch open and closed vehicles.

Then there were three BTR-60 (I think) vehicles and a pair of UAZ-469 (I think). In addition, there were some support teams in the box: Three mortars, three anti-tank missile teams and three DSHK teams. These are welcome additions to my estisting troops. My existing troops and vehicles are in the tray minus the T-55 tanks.

I also have five T-55 tanks of which only one is painted. The rest are at least undercoated and assembled. These I had purchased previously and are not pictured.

In addition, the lot came with some US forces. There were three M1 tanks! I have a box of unassembled M1 Abrams tanks that I haven't done anything with. I may have one painted but without the MERDEC paint job. There is what I think is an M2 Bradley, eight infantry and what I think may be an LAV-25. The LAV-25 mostly served with the 82nd Airborne Division within the US Army. I am not sure how much that will see action on the table but I have happy to have it.

This will provide me with more than enough for a Chain of Command sized game. I will try to spend some time doing touch up on the paint that has chipped before getting back to the Singling Campaign. For Chain of Command, I think I have enough men now for two to three platoons of Soviets. I now have both Mechanized Division and Armor Division forces. I have some T-72s in a box waiting to be assembled. I have one completed T-72 and another that is partially assembled. I will try to have three T-72s for my Soviets and build the rest for my Syrian troops.

Singling Progress 3/26/2025

I worked some more on the buildings for the Singling project. The progress has been exceedingly slow.

The first up is building 10/8. I will try to print the opposite image of this building to make the other half. It is coming along. I have fixed the roof and will glue the roof to the main building just to simplify it.

I finished the plastering of building 28. It still looks horrible. I will paint it before putting on the roof and chimneys.

The school is stalled while I was waiting to finish a print job. I am uncertain what I did with the print stick. So it is unchanged in a while.

I have finished bricking one chimney of the warbases townhouse.

The L Shaped Barn has the most progress. It is coming together. While gluing the building I ran out of super glue. So it is still in some pieces.

I purchases some snow flock for the infantry. I promply ran out of spackle for basing. I did get two successful prints of 76mm gunned Sherman tanks. At the most, I will need four of them. This is very achievavble. I also bought a US Army paint set from Vallejo. I should be able to cure and base these in the next few days.

Building 10 and more

When you work on a 3d model, you never know how it will turn out until it is printed. I had a friend print out the model that I cobbled together for Building 10 in Singling. The results were interesting. The building itself came out well. The side portion also printed well and looks good. The main building, I didn't piece together well enough and it left a cut in the building that is currently held together by the window frame. The main roof is the problem. The join between them failed. The roof was too thin and looks bad. It will need to be reprinted. I may try to print from my resin printer to see if there is a difference.

I finished the assembly of the parts of the Warbases Townhouse building. I am using brick paper for the chimneys. I have about half of one of the two chimneys done. The building will be plastered and I may add shutters. still debating.

The order from Tabletop Terrain order came in. The models are very nice. They are detailed and come in multiple parts. Far more parts than I had anticipated. It will take some fitting to get them to work. The L Shaped Barn arrived in ten separate pieces. I am trying to figure out how to assemble it without messing up the models.The Cafe Gonderee model is very nice as well. It comes with a removable roof and separate floors. It is a little more straight forward on how to assemble. These will be nice additions to the table.

I brought home a 3d printed version of the Singling School. I was disapointed. The windows on the back are barely visible. The details on the front door are almost invisible. Also the building came out smaller than the scratch built version. The slanted base that I had made for it is also too small. I will have to scratch build a base for it. Hopefully that won't be too bad. For the scratch built one, the back and side windows still need to be reprinted as well as the center second story window. I have a file ready to print, just not the time to print it. I did get the front center window printed over the weekend with a partial print of some Sherman Tanks for the scenario. The print failed to print part of the hulls. The treads had some issue being removed from the supports and one broke.

The image above you can see the original broken window from the first print and the other windows of the second print. I may need to rethink that thickness for other projects.

I started work on the L Shaped Barn. I had to sand the parts where the buildings joined as they were a bit rough. The Join on the corner had a piece that extended I cut with a band saw so the pieces fit together. In doing this, the model broke but not too badly so it could be glued. I am doing a few pieces at a time. I will end up with a solid building piece in the end and a solid roof in the end.

I also started work on the Cafe Gondoree over the weekend. I glued it together and will deal with it as a single piece instead of removable floors.

Sorry for the rambling nature of this post. I put it together over the course of a week.

Singling School House

I spend a little bit of time on the Singling School house over the weekend. The house is artist mounting board with a tile roof on it. I have spackled the front and one side of the building. I need to print the missing window frames. The front upper center window failed when I printed it. I need to try and get those redone. The side and back windows need to be done as well. Since this building is on a slope, I have a 3d model of the full building as well. My debate is on do I 3d print the sloped base or scratch build it to match the rest of the building or dump what I have and 3d print the whole thing. The building is currently held together with a considerable amount of hot glue. I am not happy with the roof as it looks like it is sagging. I still plan on keeping it and finishing it out. But I am also going to have it printed. Then I will choose which one I like.

I am waiting for pictures until I have at least all of the windows in place and have the building spackled. At this point, it is less than impressive.

Besides the school, I purchased a 3D building off of Wargaming 3d from Hartolia Miniatures. Actually it is the set "Set of three traditional European stone buildings with farm and stable (7)." Within the set, there is an L shaped house. This was a reasonable approximation of Building 10 in Singling. It did have some features that I wasn't interested in. It had an L shaped wall stuck to the building. It also had a set of stairs that led to the back door. The main part of the building was too narrow. I put these in Tinkercad and cut the stairs off. Lowered the door. Changed the windows and sliced off the L shaped wall. Then I stretched the main part of the building to a size closer matching the historic building. This made the building much closer to Building 10 of Singling. The roof is still not right as in Singling, both halves of the building were the same height. I had to work on the main house roof and rebuild it so it would fit with the resized building. This made the modeled roof tiles looking wrong. So I reuilt it but did so with a smooth roof with the intent of putting on separate roof tiles sheets on it. I will see how it comes out. The building will need to be plastered to cover up the changes that I made to the building. It definitely left it scarred.

I did do some work on Building 28. That consisted of measuring for the roof tiles and glueing the two halves of the building together. I also started work on the Warbases townhouse in 15mm. It is a nice building. I have the pieces assembled. Other than that the weekend was spent on things other than hobbying.

Here is an update on the town square table. The first image is pictures of the actual buildings from just after the battle and in the present.

The second is the buildings I have worked on for this.

One item I did do is work on the dirt road section for the town square. It was still drying and didn't get any pictures of it.

Tabletop Terrain & Sabotag3d

I have been seeing ads for Tabletop Terrain popping up in my feed for quite some time now. In looking through their items, I have been drawn to the large Rural Barn in their WWII range. It looked ideal for Singling. There is a "U" shaped farm building near the middle of the town. I am only using a portion of this building in one of the scenarios. This building would give me more than enough to work with. I placed an order for it today. In addition, I picked up the Cafe Gondoree Benouville model as well. Depending on how it shipps, I may only use the smaller half of the building. It has the slopping roof that I was looking for.

The prices on their models seem reasonable and the shipping didn't seem outrageous. (They did have some shipping methods that would heve been 3xs the cost of the models. I did not pick one of those.) They have many different categories of buildings and depending on how these come out, I may be ordering some more.

I have also been eyeing some of the wonderful things on the Sabotag3d website. I jumped in and bought their farm items (green houses and outbuildings) as well as some shutters. I am looking forward to printing these. This should give some nice updates to existing buildings. There are lots of gems on the website but some of them are harder to find than others.

Additional Buildings for Singling

Building 8 no longer stands today. But the building next to it, Building 10, does or at least a similar one stands in its place. These two buildings seem to be mirror images of each other. Given this, I decided to see if I can find an existing 3d model that would be a good standin. It took a while but I did find an L Shaped house but the main part of the house was too small. The building in Singling today has both halves of the building the same height. The one I found had the smaller side of the L with a lower roof. I decided that I could live with the roof difference. But I spend some time remaking the building in Tinkercad. I am happy with the results considering that I plan on plastering much of the building and some of the joins will be covered and the building will look better.

The roof of the larger half proved to be the most difficult. I basically had to rebuild it from scratch. My problem is that there were so many pieces to it, the file is not downloading from Tinkercad. It will not join several of the pieces together in a group either. I am concerned that I will have to redo the roof again. Tinkercad is a fun tool but it does have some limitations.

If I can get the files exported, I am going to try to reverse the building and have a mirror image of it so it can be used for both buildings 8 & 10. But I need to get the roof fixed first. I measured it and I should be able to print the thing of my resin printer. It will be a very long print though. I have run everything through a slicer except the main roof as it is still not cooperating.

Hopefully the next update will have pictures.

Building 28 - Printed

I made a 3d Model of building 28 in Singling. It is based off of partial images of the building from the period and Google Earth images of the current building as it stands today. The building would be larger than the print bed of my resin printer. I could have cut the building into multipe portions but instead, I had a friend print it for me. He has a Bamboo printer that is really nice. He printed it into two pieces. The building has three dormers in the front of the building but none in the back (from what I could tell). The plan for this building, is to give it a plaster coating, a tile roof and then place lintels on the windows. I am concerned about the roof as the dormers will present some difficulty to cut around. The doors on the physical building are recessed as are the windows. I am debating on how to address the windows. I may just place black paper behind the windows. Currently, it is still in its raw printed form and not very interesting.

In addition, waiting on my desk was an order from Warbases. It was one that I forgot that I had placed. I got the two storey townhouse and a set of Raven dice for Midgard. It will become the building behind Building 28 or the church in Singling. The raven dice are nice as well.

So at this point the town square is coming along nicely. I have a ruined house (#44) taht was burning that is 80% done, The Church across from it, building 28 on the square (just starting), the school (about 20% done, need to print some more pieces), and Building #7 (this is complete). These are the immediate buildings on the town square. For the table, I still need several more buildings. Some of these will be provided from my existing buildings. The goal is in the next two weeks to have all of the buildings on the square and the fences for them complete. Then I can set them up on the table.

I was messing around in Tinkercad and decided to build out the whole school house building. That was an interesting exercise. It looks pretty good but would take a VERY long time to print on my resin printer. It would just fit. Lets see how the scratch build goes first.

Weekend Work

I did get some work done over the weekend. I was able to sort through my US Winter troops and believe I have enough to tackle the Singling scenarios. I am missing a machinegun squad and a 60mm mortar squad but the records of the battle do not show those units playing a part. I only had one bazooka team but I think I can pull from some of my summer troops to make up the difference. I still need to order three LMG teams for the Germans.

All of the infantry needs basing. I need to get some snow flock. I think I will base on US pennies again and use the sabot bases that I have for the leaders. I will prime the pennies first this time.

I managed to get some paint on the ruined building. I went with a red scheme and am not entirely happy with it. I need to pick out some details still and add some rubble inside.

I also 3d printed some of the fences needed for house #28. It had a low stone wall with a wrought iron fence on top. This was my interpretation of that.

I had some fun making these. I could go back and put grooves in them for bricks. But I was thinking of not doing that and just painting them gray.

I also started to print some M4 76mm tanks. However, I may have run out of resin as I was printing. I need to pull them off the print plate and see how they turned out.

Singling House and Barn

I did get some painting done on Sunday and Monday. I finished off a barn from Empires at War. I had plastered the barn but left the exposed brick portions alone. I then painted it up. The roof is some plasticard tiles that were painted. In general, I think it came out pretty well.

I also revisited the blue house I had worked on. The house was far to bright. So I used some Army Painter Light Tone that was watered down to try to dull our the house. I think it is better but the stains I had placed on it originally is too dark. But I will keep it.

The town continues to grow. I worked on cutting out the road section for the town square. I made a paper template earlier and ended up cutting the roads larger than the template. I am not 100% sure this is perfect but it isn't bad. I am looking at existing buildings that i had and seeing if i can use these in the town as well. There are definitely differences in painting styles between the buildings but I think it will work.

I have started working on a destroyed house that I will use off the town square. The building is assembled. I will need to plaster it and then glue down some additional rubble. Then it will need painting. This is the building that I will use for the one on fire on the town square. I should be able to work on this in the next few days.

The School needs to be worked on. I am concerned that I'm running out of the tile roofing material. This building, along with the church, are notable structures in the town. I have sketched out a template for the building that I will use to cut out some thick card or foam core for. The house, building 28, on the town square will also be on my to do list. There really isn't any significant architectural items for me to 3d print. I have some rough dimensions for the building and will try to sketch out a template for it next. The roof will be the worrisome part of it.

Infantry wise, I just received a package from Gajo Games. I have sorted through the miniatures and am very pleased with what I received. My only problem is I will need three more LMG teams to complete out a Panzer Grenadier Platoon. For the scenario, I am probably OK as the platoons were greatly reduced. It came with two PanzerShreck teams. I need to base these. They are wonderfully painted. I am very pleased. I also received my US troops as well but didn't take them out of the bags yet. This should be more than enough miniatures for the battles. However, I am still working on how to integrate the German infantry into the actions given their performance in the battle.

Singling Project Continued

I started to assemble a ruined house. This will probably serve as the burning house on the town square. The plan is to order some infantry from Gajo miniatures to have a winter base platoon for both US and German infantry. (Note, I just placed the order today. Gajo has excellent customer service and I have ordered from them before.) This will open up some additional options for gaming. I have a winter platoon of Soviets still in the box unopened. I will eventually get to these miniatures.

For the town square, I will look to work on the streets for it. I will likely make a set piece that will be the roads as it is such an odd join. I have made a paper template that I need to match up with the existing road thickness that I have. The My current roads are felt strips that are covered in grout, sand and paint. They are simple and seem to work.

The church is largely done. The other buildings on the town square would be buildings 7, 8, 28, the school. Building 8 is an L shaped house. Seven is also a house. I may use the blue house that I have painted up for it. The school and building 28 will need to be scratch built. House 8, I will look for possible buildings I can purchase. These will be my focus for the time being. If you look at the village now, Building #7 is now replaced with a new cinderblock building. Building 44 has been rebuilt and seems similar to the original eventhough it was buring during the battle. Building 6 no longer exists. There is a picture of it at the time of the battle and does not look significantly damaged. Buildings 8, 9 and 10 are no longer present. There are new buildings in its place or an empty lot. Building 12 is a set of row houses both then and now. The building was damaged during the battle but it is unclear if this building is a replacement or just rebuilt. Now a street exists where before it was an alley betwen buildings 10 and 8. The school house still stands. A new building now exist between the school (still standing) and building 23. It is unclear if the building in the space where building 23 stood is that same building or a new one. The large U shaped farm structures are still present but are likely new construction.

For the other tables of the battle, I think I have a good selection of miniatures. I do need three JadgPanzer IVs. The 11th Panzer Division, whose Panther V tanks were in Singling, had as one of its organic units the Panzerjager Abtielung 61. This unit was equipped in November 1944 with a mix of Marder III and JadgPanzer IV vehicles. There are pictures online of knocked out vehicles of both types attributed to this unit. The after action reports list the self-propelled guns as ones based on a Panzer IV chassis mounting a 75mm gun. This matches the Jadgpanzer IV and not the Marder III. This is still just an educated guess but a reasonable one.

I need to make some winter trees. They should be straight forward. To make an orchard, it should be a difficult thing. I believe that I have spare tree sprues to do this. Most are from the

Once more as things are finished, I will post pictures. I have been enjoying building this up.