The Rush commences and a new member of the team arrives

With just over a month to go before Salute I have a self imposed target of finishing my DAK before April 16th. They have sat in my cupboard for far too long, so long in fact that the blu tack temporarily basing them to their 2p coins is hard and brittle.

I intend to have the second squad and command finished by Thursday bar the varnishing and that will give me some time to prime and paint the remaining sprue plus the 4 Artizan DAK sentries that I bought recently before April.

This will give me a full Zug plus a 50mm mortar and ATR as well as a couple of sentries. Certainly enough for a desert skirmish or two but probably not enough to compete with Craig's LRDG and SAS. The one thing I have noticed is the difference in detail between metal and plastic sculpts. The Artizan figures are full of it where's the Perry plastics are, shall we say, a little bland. Having said that, from a distance you cannot tell which is which and that is the whole point.

Assuming that I finish these, next years plastics will be some Russians that I can hack away at and convert into a Penal Unit. That should be simple enough, even for me, no equipment and no weapons for half of them, the rest have only Moisin Nagant and a couple of rounds.  Of course the Commissars behind them might have a Ppsh or two 'pour encourages les autres'.

Photos of the DAK as they stumble into the sunshine in a day or two.

My brother gave me an excellent Christmas present the year. I present to you 'Keef' the Zombie gnome. Named after a certain musician who should theoretically be a Zombie given the amount of pharmaceuticals they have added to their bloodstream over the years, his role is to protect the gooseberry bushes on the allotment as well as laying down a few tunes. He came already painted, I was tempted to give him a couple of highlights and dipping him in Army Painter strong tone before he went outside.....