Making a gun emplacement - Part 7

Crew - final choice, final tinkering…

I've taken a bit longer - perhaps too long - to put together this crew, but as this is my first attempt at playing Dr. Frankenstein I guess I was bound to expend a little too much time on these modifications.

First lesson - soft plastic is a pig to work with!

It actually 'frays' if you attempt to sand it making a unholy mess, so neat and careful carving and shaving with a very sharp craft knife is critical to a clean finished figure. Smoothing of uneven bits or filling must then be done with Milliput or similar putty.

The actual mating of spare limbs and heads isn't all that hard, but you have to chose your doner limbs carefully to match the victim…Er, sorry I mean patient! In the case of my figure who is carrying the ammo crate I used a very thin Revell arm and so had to pad it out a lot - in essence rebuild the arm - with putty to match his other arm.

Tip: I add a reinforcing pin - a small piece of metal wire - to each body part in order to fix it securely to the torso.

Above: These PSC Soviets needed new arms to give them relevance within the gun crew. I quite like the crate carrying figure, it's quite a dynamic pose now. Hopefully the painting will hide his shoddy bionic appendage!

The helmets turned out not so bad and I have the technique fairly sorted now and it's quite quick to do. I just have to add the side rivets which are a distinctive feature if the German WW1 helmet. Luckily, for my infantry I will be making the far simpler Czech M1935 'pudding bowl' helmet as well and that's a doddle.

Above: These are the two 'cut & shut' composite figures made from PSC head and legs and HaT bodies. I needed these for the specialist artillery poses, but the HaT head and legs didn't match the PSC figures so had to be changed. It wasn't all that hard, though my filling leaves something to be desired.

It's been a useful experiment and I am now more confident with working with small figures and have a better idea with what can be done. Obviously I cannot lavish this level of modelling on each and every figure in my Finnish army, but the artillery crews are of sufficient specialism that they need quite unique poses - a rifleman is pretty much a rifleman and won't need much more than a change of hat or helmet!

NEXT: Honest - I will paint these next!

Finnish field guns - basic paint coat

It's nice to see a 'herd' of models together at one time and is what has swayed me more to the war gaming side of the hobby than the individual display side of things. There is a weird attraction to seeing a group of vehicles or weapons like this together.

Anyway, here's a group of my WW2 Finnish Army field guns. These include two of my light Putilov 76mm guns and three LeFH18 105mm medium howitzers (by Revell and Armourfast). This is just the field green base coat - Humbrol's Dark Green spray - but it does bring out the detail nicely.

I will be keeping these guns a plain field green with appropriate weathering and will resist the temptation to apply the pretty Finnish 3 colour camo pattern to them. I guess for war gaming there may be an argument to apply a standard camo across your army to aid easy identification of units, certainly the guys at the Flames of War site could not help themselves and use the 3 colour scheme on their Putilov guns...

Above: The Flames of War team could not help themselves but applied the
distinctive Finnish 3-colour camo scheme to this field gun. This despite the fact
that the Finnish Army actually used a rather more mundane field green.

A simple field green may not be the most attractive scheme but using this camo on ALL my Finnish models just wouldn't be authentic. One thing though, my flash has turned Humbrol's Dark Grey into something a lot more like mid-grey, I will have to adjust my lighting in my next snaps to get a truer reflection of the green coat I have applied.

Finnish artillery Part 2 - Putilov gun & crew

Time to assemble my gun, but wait - what about a crew? (Much head scratching...)

This part of my plan is a little vague and really shows how much I have to learn in order span the divide between making models and playing war games. This model is very much an experiment in creating a war game gun section and as such I do have a senario in mind - mid-war Finnish - and so I need a crew that reflects this.

Problem is that there doesn't appear to be a 1/72 scale Finnish Continuation War artillery crew out there. TQD do a very nice set of figures for exactly this job and I bought some, but here's were my inexperience let me down. 20mm isn't the same as 1/72, in fact it's closer to 1/76 - this despite the fact that some people on the internet seem to be under the impression that these sizes are interchangeable. They're not (as I am sure any experience modeller would agree).

Anyway, I've had to do a bit of lateral thinking and come up with a usable alternative. As it happens HaT - who made the Putilov gun I am modelling here - also make a range of gun crew sets - WW1 British, Italian, Russian and Austrian. Of these the Austrian figures bear the closest resemblance to a Finnish WW2 crew, dressed in what is essentially a German style tunic and peaked field cap.*

Above: Two examples from the 1/72 HaT Austrian gun crew (grey plastic) and
the 20mm TQD Finnish gun crew (white metal). You can see that the 20mm
figures are just a little smaller.

There are some minor details I will have to modify, such as removing the cap cockaid and turning the WW1 style leg putties into calf length boots, but once painted in the Finnish blue-grey the effect should be acceptable.

The HaT figures aren't as detailed or expressive or even as attractively posed as the TQD ones, but they are the correct scale for the HaT field gun (I shall keep the SHQ ones for a 1/76 project). The other advantage of The HaT crew is that they come in a box of 32 figures for just £3.83 from eModels.co.uk. The TQD figures were £1.95 for three.

Of course, when it comes a company of Finnish infantry I shall have to think of something else as the equipment used by the Finns made them pretty distinctive, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

Above: The constructed Putilov 76mm and gun crew ready for painting. The
extra figures in light grey are from Revell's 1/72 WW1 German Infantry set. These
wear the distinctive WW1 'coal scuttle' helmet - the M1916 Stahlhelm - which
was common in the mid-WW2 Finnish Army. I thought these figures could
further expand the variety of my gun crews.

Together with the gun the little group looks quite nice, the extra accessories which come with the HaT gun crew - like ammo crates and even a couple of spare shells - help to create a nice little scene. All that's left to do now is to paint them!

NEXT: Basing and painting the gun and crew

* In fact the mid-war Finnish infantry used WW2 German style tunics (in blue-grey), a mix of German WW1 and Italian helmets, with Mosin-Nagant variant rifles and Suomi KP/-31 SMGs. The thicker blue-grey tunic gave way to a thinner lighter grey version in the summer.

Finnish artillery Part 1 - Putilov 76mm unboxing

Product description: HaT 1/72 Putilov 76mm M1902 Gun (Set 8173)

Right - I have a cunning plan, as the venerable Baldric would say (oh, dear, I've even started speaking like a war gamer now!). To see what it's like to actually make an army for war gaming I'm creating a small formation of WW2 Finnish, not a full battalion but a 'half company' so I can get to grips with what it's like to plan and create large scale collection.

I've already made some basic administrative decisions about what will constitute this mini-army which I will discuss in a separate post, but to kick off the more enjoyable bit I have bought my first section of artillery support. My choice of guns are medium field guns which made up the backbone of the Finnish artillery throughout WW2, the Russian Putilov 76mm field piece.

The Finns had over 200 of these World War 1 vintage guns and by all accounts thought highly of it because of it' simplicity and ruggedness. New ammunition was developed for it to keep it viable including HEAT (High Explosive Anti-tank) in 1944.

The HaT model is very competitively priced, particularly as you get 4 guns in the set. I acquired mine from eBay (Arcane Scenery & Model Supplies) for £6.15 plus postage.

As you can imagine it is a slightly simplified model for war gaming, but I have read in a couple of reviews that it is generally quite accurate. Plastic Soldier Review note that it's made of a hard plastic and I have to say it does look crisply done.

One slight draw back is that this set come with no crew. But HaT does do it's own separate Russian WW1 artillery crew set to accompany these guns. My particular problem is that I want to crew my Putilovs with WW2 Finns in summer uniform, something that is a bit tricky as no specific sets apear to exist (there is one 1/72 Finnish gun crew in winter uniform and SHQ do a 1/76 crew in summer garb).

NEXT: I put together the gun section and crew them with my make-shift solution.


More information about WW2 Finnish artillery can be found here - www.jaegerplatoon.net/ARTILLERY1.htm