SchupoSonderWagen '21 in the flesh

 

Now that I have my 15mm Daimler SchupoSonderWagen 1921 (https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/daimler-schupo-sonderwagen-1921/) printed (resin, Mars Pro), it's time to start thinking about painting it.

I want to paint it more or less as it appeared in 1945, during the battle for Berlin.

This photograph was taken outside the Reich Chancellery. It had been taken out of storage and pressed into service along with everything else that was available in those desperate times.

The Panzerwrecks entry for this vehicle suggests that it was painted overall grey, as it would have been pre-war. That's not unlikely, since it was a police vehicle, not military, so it likely wouldn't have been in a dunkelgelb military livery.

It has been suggested that it might have been in "police green", whatever that was, but I prefer the grey since that makes it easier for me to use in a variety of milieus.

Panzerwrecks shows it very rusty, which wouldn't be unlikely since it had been in ungentle storage for years. I might well paint it fairly well weathered, but I don't think I'll rust it up quite as much as this illustration shows.

Basing With Washers

 

I like to base my 15mm infantry on 12.5mm (½ inch) steel washers so that I can store and transport them safely on magnetic sheet. However, I don't like the big hole in the middle of the washer.

I've come up with what I think is a good solution: I 3d print a shroud for the washer on my old Ender 3. It gives me a flat top to the base, and it only increases the base diameter to about 14mm, and increases its thickness by 0.4mm. I can print an array of 25 of them in about quarter of an hour.

These figures are some US Marines I got second-hand; I'm not sure of the manufacturer, but I suspect Battlefront. They don't have Peter Pig's screaming faces.

I'd already started basing some of them, and those ones I'll just put into upside-down shrouds, purely to maintain consistency across them all.

I'll do something similar for the 22mm washers I use for team weapons.

 

Sabot Bases

I use 3d-printed sabot bases to ease mass-movement, and so that the minis don't just fall out due to my clumsiness, I put magnets in little sockets in the bottom of the big sockets.

The magnets I've used here are 5x1mm, and the whole sabot base is 3mm thick, with the sides slightly undercut to make them easier to pick up. They're thicker than I would like for WWII games, but I'll live with it to avoid having to move a bajillion 15mm figures individually. 

 

These long, curved single-rank bases are better visually I think, and also more flexible inasmuch as the figures can be set in a rank (as shown here) or in a file for moving along paths and the like.

Schupo Sonderwagen 1921

 

I have finally managed to finish my 15mm (1:100) Weimar Republic Schupo Sonderwagen of 1921. At least one of these armoured cars was still trundling around Berlin when the Soviets took the city in 1945.

The STLs are available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/daimler-schupo-sonderwagen-1921/

 

Later on...

Unditching ramps

I've added a separate STL for the wooden unditching ramps that could be carried over the port rear wheel.

However, due to the limitations of the STL format's floating point calculations, it will probably come into the slicer ten times too large. It should be only 14mm long. Rescaling it to 10% should do the trick.