Building Bridges

Bergman's Valentine bridgelayer

My Covenanter

That talented Mr Bergman has designed a 1:100 scale Valentine bridgelayer, which I am in the process of printing right this instant.

I learn, from the Tank Museum's Tank Chats on Youtube, that the Aussies used the Covenanter hull instead of the Valentine, but they used the exact same bridge and mechanism. It seems to me that it should be fairly easy to kit-bash a Covenanter bridgelayer using some of Bergman's geometry on some of the Covenanter I designed quite a while ago.

I'll have to see if I can dig out some pictures of the Australian bridgelayer, but I suspect they'd have done away with the storage bins on the Covenanter's hull front, in order to ease the attachment of the front components of the bridge extension mechanism.

Craters, and More Craters

 

Fat Dragon Games has a freebie crater STL from their "World War Tesla" stuff available on DriveThruRPG. I nabbed it and printed some, variously resized in singles as well as merged into doubles and triples.

I'll use them to display barrage aiming points for BG, and they could also be used to indicate artillery-broken ground for WW1 games and the like. Or giant insect burrows for RPG games, for that matter.

Making one or two or three craters using traditional modelling methods is a trivial matter; making one or two or three dozen of them starts to get to be a bit of a chore. With my 3d printer, I can just set it to printing a dozen of them overnight and then forget about them until the morning when they're done, all thanks to the magic of FDM robotics.

d4 that I can pick up

 

I got tired of trying to pick up frictionless little tetrahedrons whenever I want to throw a bunch of four-sided dice, so I made some that are a bit easier to manipulate.

The shape is basically a squared football based on a distorted 16mm cube, so that they can only come to rest on four of the faces, and they're not much bigger than the six-siders I use.

The resin I use in my 3d printer is pretty soft, so it would probably not be a great idea to throw them around too much on a hard surface, but then again they don't have any hard edges to chip away. I'll just have to see how they last, and after all, I can always print more.

There are much harder-wearing ABS-like printing resins, but I don't have any.

Medium C Hornet again, but bigger

 

I've redesigned my 1:100 scale model of the Medium C "Hornet" for 1:56 (28mm). That mainly means refining the size of the rivets, adding some detail to the Hotchkiss machine-guns, and a few other bits and pieces.

It's at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/medium-c-hornet-156/

Renault UE Chenillette (1:100)

 

The Renault UE Chenillette was a utility vehicle designed for the French army and adopted in the mid 1930s. It was never intended as a fighting vehicle, though it was armoured against small arms — it was intended as a light gun tow, and as a resupply vehicle. The cargo bin on the back could be tipped and unloaded from within, without having to expose the crew to enemy fire. Captured examples were widely used by the Germans in a variety of roles, especially in Russia.

This is a 1:100 scale model intended for 15mm gaming, but it should rescale pretty well up to 28mm scales.

I have included three cargo modules that can be printed separately and be slotted into the cargo bin, or not, as the user desires.

It may be possible to print the 1:100 scale model in FDM, but I have only printed it in resin, so I can make no guarantees there.

The STLs are available from wargaming3d.com at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/renault-ue-chenillette/

Later...

I've now also built, and successfully test-printed, the little tracked trailer that was characteristically used with the Chenillette to expand its cargo-carrying capacity.

I've added the STL for the trailer to the zip file on wargaming3d.com, and at some stage I'll also get around to adding some cargo loads for it as well.

Abandoned Lighthouse

Clickupon to embiggenate

I'm not sure who was the author of this model, nor where it originally came from. It might have been Thingiverse, it might have been from one of the Humble Bundles of STLs I've collected over time. All I know about it is that it's named "Abandoned Lighthouse", and it's scaled for use with 28mm figures.

It prints in several parts: one for the island, one for each floor of the tower (of which there are five), one for the roof, and a couple of light options. The one I've chosen is a simple brazier, the other is a sort of magical egg-light.

The tower sections include some interior detail, and it comes apart so that miniatures can be put inside.

I painted the stonework using the "leopard spot" technique.

First everything is painted in loose splotches of  raw sienna, burnt umber, and a sort of terracotta orange. The paint is quite loose, so it flows around and mingles a bit at the edges of the other colours.

In retrospect, I think yellow ochre would have been a better choice for the lightest tone, and burnt sienna for the middle.

At this point it all looks fairly terrible and gaudy.

Next I overpaint it all with a couple of layers of a black wash.

This tones down all the clown colours and unifies them tonally.

It all looks pretty dark now, but there's a variation in tone underneath the black wash that still shows through.

Then I dry-brushed with a cream colour, and highlight with pure white.

This lightens everything substantially, and brings out the surface detail of the model.

In this photo, I've also made the very first start on some vegetation, but at this point it's more like a bowling lawn than a wild weed patch.

Ballista

This is the ballista model supplied with Printable Scenery's ships.

It's quite a nicely detailed model, and it could do with being printed quite a bit larger — a 200% or even 300% print wouldn't be over the top for a siege engine. 

The figure, as usual, is Sergeant Measureby, present for scale.