MOAR!! Flames of War 8th Army Tanks and Artillery

Cleaning up a few remnants of boxed sets I've bought for the Western Desert project. I'd already painted the Grants from the "Monty's Desert Rats" box but that left these three Crusaders and the two artillery pieces to do. First up, the armour...

Here are the three Crusaders, equipped with 6-pounder guns (I'm concentrating on "after-El-Alamein"). As usual I picked out one to have a commander sticking out of the hatch. Camo was two-colour in keeping with the rest of the force. 

The Battlefront material had limited images of the Crusader so I had to look on the web to see how the camo looked on the "other side" of the vehicle. Fortunately "Key Model World" came to the rescue with copious photos of a 1/32 Airfix build here. Thanks John Bonanni!

As with all of the British armour, the tanks were painted Light Earth as a base, with camo done in Castellan Green highlighted Deathworld Forest. The whole thing was washed Agrax Earthshade then re-highlighted in the base colours, and lastly chipped with German Camo Black-Brown on a sponge.

I also had one Honey built so I painted that too. It's a model from Plastic Soldier Company and don't be too hard on me if you see inaccuracies in the build... I basically wanted to replicate the sand-skirted model that Battlefront makes but I'm not sure I built exactly the right combo of top hatch and skirts... looks fine to me if I squint.

These are certainly iconic little desert tanks aren't they! I still have four more to build...

Now to the guns! The box set came with two sprues that could built as either 25-pounder field guns or 17/25-pounder antitank guns. But since we have the means, I figured why not make the tubes swappable and have both??

The accessories and crew for the models are great. Here we see a 25-pounder.

And here are the models with the 17-pounder tube swapped in for maximum anti-tank capability.

Easy to do, really - that's a small disc magnet in between the trunnion supports...

...and on the 17-pounder tube there's a 2mm spacer and another disc magnet. The 25-pounder tube didn't need a magnet and adding one would lower the muzzle too much anyway, so I just added a small piece of very thin sheet metal to stick to the magnet. Easy swapping and nothing is visible.

And there you go, some more models for Conscript Hugh to figure into the British army list for our next desert clash.

Toodles!