WW2 German Motorcycles with Side-cars(part 5). Plus New Games Room

Not the usual style pictures today as I have had to take these pictures at my work bench and not at the games table. When the new table is made, I will set the scene for these and take a few action shots. 

As you can see, here we have some 28mm WW2 German motorcycles with side-cars from Wargames Foundry and Warlord's Bolt Action range. In the picture below, the two bikes in the front are from Foundry and the two at the back are Warlord's. Both sets are a good match in scale and are a joy to paint.

  

I have based them on 50mm round bases from Warbases.co.uk and glued some embossed plasticard down on top for a cobbled road effect.

For a reconnaissance squad (Aufklarungs Squad), I will only actually be needing three motorcycles with side-cars, one LMG with two crew on one machine and three riflemen each on the other two but I am sure the fourth bike will get used at some point.

   
As I write this on a Saturday morning, the builder is in the garage building a new wall for my games room. Originally the garage was divided into two thirds game room, a wall and then one third for bike storage etc.

 I have decided to knock the wall down and use the full length of the garage, this will give me a 10ft x 5ft table with access all the way around it, instead of a 7ft x 5ft table with one end fixed to the wall and only access to three sides.

The original table with access to only three sides.

 I originally built the table quite high for an extra level of storage but I have now been able to drop the height as I will be building extra storage along the new wall.

Old table and storage.

I will do a work in progress over the next couple of weeks as I put an extension on the new table and resurface it to match the existing table. I also have 40ft of some excellent new back drop which I will be fitting all the way around the walls. I will be fitting these with no corners but using curved back boards, and they are actual photo prints of overcast sky and 15 inch deep rather than the 9 inch coloured paper that I had before.
I will be fitting extra daylight tubes in the room and also plan on upgrading the actual look of the playing surface, so hopefully you will notice a big improvement in future posts.

WW2 Armour part 4. PANZER GREY

 

There is quite a bit of discussion on the forums regarding what colour to use for painting Panzer Grey. From what I can gather, if you want to go for accuracy then you should be painting your vehicles very dark, almost black but some modellers have gone with a lighter colour to compensate for the smaller scale of a model. With 28mm you can probably get away with either option looking okay but when you start getting into the smaller scales, an almost black colour vehicle is going to be looking a little bland.
I have opted for the less accurate but more visual look of the lighter blue/grey using Vallejo German Grey (995) then highlighted using a white mixed in with the colour.

I painted a test piece on a Lledo die cast vehicle, which was still a little dark but usable for my early war or even WW1 collections.

      

The rest of the vehicles are from Warlord and looking from left to right we have an Opel Blitz Truck, a Panzer 1a, Panzer 35(t) and a Panzer IV AUSF.D which I will be using to support my early and mid war collections.

The resin on the Opel Blitz was warped so Warlord sent me a replacement which had both options of open and a covered top, so I painted both.

And to finish with the usual action/staged shots.