OK, the force is coming together. I decided to finish the recon elements next. This would include two recon troops. Putting this together was a bit of a challenge. I already had a ton of older Battlefront resin Jeeps. I like these, as they have a lot of storage to add character. The new Battlefront set comes with both armored cars and jeeps. I did not want or want to pay for more jeeps, so I looked for other options. I did not like the other manufacture models (all in metal), so went with a resin option from Battelfield3D. These all got base painted with the rest of the total batch at the beginning of the project.
Well, that was the plan… While moving the boxes of models around, I managed to drop the box with the armored cars (and much of the other French stuff). Some time ago. Most of the other models faired fine. I had to glue some parts back on here and there. Some of the other metal models had a few chips that I needed to fix. However these would mostly be taken care of during weathering, so no real problem. Where I did have a problem, was the M-8 armored cars. Every turret managed to have the main guns and machine gun rings to be broken off…. Fixing those was not in the cards. Disaster! Fortunately, I had extra M-8 turrets from the earlier done M-20 armored cars from Battlefront (same sprue for both armored cards). So, I assembled them and painted them up to decal stage. Back on track!
The Peddinghaus sheets have a couple of M-10s and a few M-8. More internet photo search and extrapolation… Once again I managed to find only single photos, but they matched the sheet, so I just pushed out the look to the other vehicles in the respective platoons.
These followed the same steps as the earlier lend lease project vehicles. I sprayed the models with Krylon dark olive camo paint, hit the bottoms with Vallejo mud pumice, black washed the tank, drybrushed up the green, added the decals, drybrushed the brown, dull coated the models and finished with a Iraqi Sand drybrush.
Disaster overcome and the recon is ready to go! One more platoon of AA and I will have finally completed all the vehicles I had redone for the project!
- Mantueffel