Kaboom! Making a wrecked T34

I've been meaning to make some wrecked and abandoned vehicles for use in Chain of Command for some time now and my recent drive to create more scatter terrain has finally got me inspired to work on something.

Several years ago I acquired a couple of the old Airfix T34 kits and as I now have more than enough T34s in my collection I thought one of these might make do as the basis for a suitable wreck. I'm also in the middle of playing the CoC campaign set around Konigsberg in 1945, so a wreck of a T34 might be something that will come in handy in the not too distant future.

I liked the idea of depicting a destroyed tank with the turret blown off. It certainly looks dramatic and there is no mistaking that it is a destroyed vehicle. The Airfix kit is quick to assemble and most of the construction time was spent creating a scratch-built interior for the hull and the turret. This is by no means based on any real interior plans, I simply wanted to show a jumble of burnt out interior details. It was just a matter of raiding the spares box and utilising pieces of plastic card and sections of old sprue to put something together.

As this wreck was going to have the turret detached from the hull it would need a base and so I cut out a suitably sized piece of MDF and then roughed up the edges using the sanding tool on my Dremel.

To create the burnt-out look I was going to use the 'hairspray method', a technique popular with larger scale AFV modellers. You can use actual hairspray, but I have some 'Worn Effects' acrylic fluid from AK interactive which serves the same purpose, but that is to jump ahead of myself. After the kit was primed I used my airbrush to paint the interiors and parts of the hull, first in red brown and then over sprayed in random patches with black.

I then textured the MDF base once I worked out how I wanted the turret to look in relation to the hull.

With that done I sprayed the Worn Effects fluid over the hull. As soon as that was dry I sprayed the main base colour for the tank, just as if I was painting it normally.

As soon as the green paint had dried I then wet the surface with water and using a stiff brush I slowly worked away at the top layer of green paint. As I was removing the green the burnt colours I had sprayed on earlier slowly appeared. It's a remarkably effective technique and gives the look of burnt and chipped paint.

With that done the hull and turret had a dry brush with brown oil paint (Vandyke Brown).

To weather the road wheels and tracks I used MiG pigments Europe Dust. I do this in stages. After each stage I spray MiG pigment fixer and then apply more dust while the fixer is still wet, that way I slowly build up the dust and dirt.

Once that's dry I give a second dry brush, again with Vandyke Brown. To prevent the paint drying too glossy I allow the oil paint to sit on some cardboard for about ten minutes and this soaks out some of the oil. I then dry brush the road wheels and tracks. This brings out some definition on the wheels and tracks and doesn't allow the pigment to dominate.

Finally the tracks were given a very light dry brush with Vallejo Oily Steel, to bring out some of the metallic aspect of the tracks.

With that the wreck was complete and the next stage was to finish off the base.

With the base painted and flocked I attached the hull and turret, but it didn't quite look right, it was all a bit clinical, so I decided I needed to add some debris. Once again I returned to the spares box for some odds and ends to fill up some of the space.

I can see it filling a variety of roles. It could add colour to the table as scatter terrain; it could represent a wrecked AFV from a previous scenario during a campaign and, while a bit large, there's no reason why it couldn't serve as a jump off point. Time well spent then.

I’ve since used the same painting technique to create a burnt out Sherman. I’m even happier with the way this one turned out. 

My intention was to have it available for our 29, Let’s Go! campaign for Chain of Command. The attacking Americans had access to a large number of Shermans and there seemed a good chance we would refight a game on a map where one had been knocked out previously.

Railway signal box for the Westwind campaign

The fourth scenario in the Westwind Konigsberg campaign for Chain of Command is an action alongside the rail lines leading into Seerappen and features a railway signal box. Despite the fact I game in 20mm and that HO is very close in scale I've had trouble finding a suitable building for this period (plenty if I want to do 1960s Britain, but not the case for 1945 East Prussia). None of the MDF manufacturers seem to make one either, certainly not in 20mm anyway, but while searching I came across the Mini-Art 1/72 Watchtower. Now a 'watchtower' is a strange description and I'm sure somewhere in the translation something got lost (Mini Art are a Ukrainian company). No matter, it will certainly do for my needs.

It looks like it is intended for modellers as some of the elements are a bit delicate for gaming, nonetheless it's the correct scale and looks right. Unlike so many MDF buildings it really doesn't need a lot of work to make it presentable. It does come in pre-coloured plastic, but this really doesn't do you any favours, as the colours are fairly horrendous. So it's mainly in need of a paint job and a suitable base.

Once constructed it was glued to an MDF base and the whole lot primed in grey. Amazing how different (and better) it looks once primed.

The brick work is quite well defined and with that in mind I used my airbrush to spray light grey in patches to represent the mortar.

The bricks themselves were painted using something between a wet brush and dry brush technique - in other words the brush was not that dry that I was dry brushing but not so wet that the wet brush technique would allow paint to seep in between the bricks. I used a mix of Vallejo colours for this, mainly Red and Orange Red. The brick colour was then lightened using Buff and the whole building was given a dry brush to pick out the highlights.

The roof tiles were painted Terractotta using a craft acrylic paint and then dry brushed, first in a lighter shade and then in various shades of browns and greys to break up the solid orange look. The woodwork of the doors and windows was painted using Vallejo Dark Blue.

I wanted to add a little more character and so downloaded some images of Deutsche Reichsbahn signs from the web and resized these down in scale.

I mounted them on card and painted around the edges to give them a slightly aged and distressed look before putting them in various locations around the signal box.

Finally the base was flocked and a few accessories like a bike and some tools were added to give it more of a lived-in look.

And here it is with some AB Russians for scale.

I hope to see this in action in a few weeks when we reach scenario four in the Westwind campaign. You can follow the game reports for all of the Chain of Command campaigns including the Westwind Konigsberg campaign on this page.

The Westwind Königsberg Campaign appears in the Too Fat Lardies Summer Special 2014. You can purchase this as a downloadable pdf from TFL Summer Special 2014.