Assembling the Troops

Continued from The Beginning

In the last post I discussed how I finally settled on the army I was going to make. Unfortunately, I'd already started buying miniatures before making my final decision. This left me with a box of T-34 obr 1942 tanks and a box of KV-1s tanks that I wasn't going to need. Plus, I'd opened both boxes and actually assembled one of the T-34 tanks before I figured this out.

Fortunately, neither was a completely wasted purchase as I ended up using them in various ways during the assembly and pre-painting process. That didn't change the fact that I still had models to buy. With that in mind I went to two sources. First, I went to my local FLGS, Black Diamond Games, and bought what they had on hand. Then I placed an order with the Warstore for the rest of what I needed.

It was shortly after I placed my order that I realized that I'd made yet another mistake, I'd ordered too many T-60 tanks! As it turned out, this also ended up not being a completely bad thing (except for my wallet).

I made a decision early on that I wasn't going to model the aircraft right away, just the tanks. There was already a rumor that Battlefront would be releasing their own aircraft models, so I decided to wait and see what they came out with rather than hunting down my own.

Assembling all the tanks took a bit of work. I had more than one T-34 hull that had broken bits, one of my T-60 hulls was warped out of shape, and all but one of my KV-1e models were missing their turret hatches! In the past this wouldn't have been much of a problem as Battlefront used to have an extremely fast turnaround on replacement parts. Unfortunately that turnaround time is now measured in months, so my goal of "quickly" building and painting an army was in jeopardy. This is where my earlier foolishness in buying models I didn't need actually helped me out. T-34 obr 1941 and T-34 obr 1942 tanks use the same hull, so I was able to swap out some of my damaged ones for good ones from the box. I had over-ordered T-60s, so one warped hull still left me with enough models. Finally, as it turned out, KV-1e tanks and KV-1s tanks use the same turret hatch. That left me set to go.

The KV-1e and T-60 tanks were relatively easy to assemble. The T-34 tanks were a bit more of a problem. The treads don't quite match up with the body and several of the turret holes were just a little too small for the turrets which meant that the turrets couldn't be turned freely. This required a bit of filing and dremel work to get things lined up properly, but it wasn't too big of a pain.

The only thing left was the tankodesantniki. These were a late addition to my list, and broke my original rule of not having any infantry models in my army. I bought the models, but decided not to work on them until after I had finished the tanks, which is what I'll discuss in my next post in this series.

Just for clarification, the picture that starts this piece shows German and not Soviet tanks. I didn't think to take any pictures of my Soviet tanks when they were under construction. The Panzer IVs in the picture above are part of one of my other projects which I'll discuss in the future. Here's some of my Soviets "assembled":



Continued in Painting the Troops