Modern Combat – Humvees, Tanks and Marines

The chassis are ready, a convoy of 3 to 4 almost identical looking vehicles would be okay, but as these will be put to use in smaller games and skirmishes, I didn't want to use clones, so I bought some Black Dog resin upgrades a while back.

Casting quality is pretty wild, some parts are just broken or not fully casted. Black Dog threw some of them in there multiple times, probably to make up for that lack of quaulity. The instructions are only available for the IDF kit and even there a bit vague.

I intended to build the Humvees closed, so it would speed up the build and painting later on, the medium armoured one wouldn't give me the option, as the doors are half-high. I mostly build plastic kits the last few months, so my super glue went a-wall. Have to say, cheap smaller tubes of super glue work better for me than the large bottles, as they have a longer shelf life. Due to the lack of instructions, I used the box and shop pictures for orientation. Googling wasn't much of a help in this case, as there are dozends of variants for upgrades Humvees.

The resin parts needed so much work, that I roughly throw away 40% of them as they were unusable (either incomplete or so flimsy, that reshaping wouldn't be an option). Had so much filing and filling to do, that I actually put my FFP2 mask to another use than shopping.

Fit of the full armoured variant was the trickiest to build, as it had some casting aids that were thicker than the material they supported and the thin remaining pieces were often warped. Quite the adrenalin rush cleaning those with the steady fear of damaging the main part. But I think overall I managed to get quite the variety into these vehicles.

A few minor details are missing, I have to add some of the clear parts and the lights on one of the vehicles. Along with filling some of the gaps between the resin parts and the main chassis.

Black Scorpion Marines, an Abrams tank and maybe I need something along the lines of an Apache or Black Hawk as an objective, both will set me back around 20-25 EUR, so not that bad. The large 30mm miniatures by Black Scorpion fit quite well with the 1:48 scale as you can see in comparison. The only thing that is off, is the size of the knee pads (see on the backpack on the cow catcher compared to the miniatures). But that is quite the detail and most won't notice.

So far I am just needing some enemies for these, so generic middle eastern bad guys, Taliban maybe, as Iraqi soldiers would be a bit to sorted and organized. I like the models by White Dragon Miniatures, but they are currently not in stock and on the wrong side of the channel...

This isn't set for a specific theme like the Gulf War, but more generic modern combat action, occassionally mixed in with zombies. So I could use this with Black Ops, Walking Dead, Spectre or Force on Force.

On top of that, I have the crew of these kits as spares. If anyone is interested in them, drop me a message.