Scale Creep Submission

So I finally went to the scale-creep dark side and got 1:43 scale vehicles for my minis. It began when I actually measured my resin 28mm vehicles from Atenociti's Workshop and found most of them to be 1:43 instead of 1:50. Shortly thereafter I discovered that Greenlight makes a line of TV and movie cars featuring a lot of 70s and 80s models that I particularly dig.

Here we have a 1987 Dodge Van in NYPD livery from Greenlight. I've oscilated back and forth on how to paint up my resin police cars, the 70s/80s white-over-blue scheme being my favorite but also the most difficult to do... the option to get prepainted cars that just need to be weathered greatly simplifies the equation. Shown with one of the Foundry Street Violence cops.

The A-TEAM is one of my primary influences in wargaming and roleplaying, so having the full array of cars from the show is a goal. Of course I have the GMC Van on order, but Face's Corvette has already arrived, shown here with the Hannibal and Face minis from Foundry's Street violence 'B-Team' pack. Greenlights Hollywood A-TEAM offerings include this, the van, and a Dodge Monaco in military police livery.

I never really watched any of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, in fact I'm fairly certain I've never actually seen an entire episode, but I really like the Jeep CJ5, and this one is plain enough to be a generic car... the California plates will mix well with the A-TEAM, TERMINATOR and KNIGHT RIDER stuff I have planned. If I can find Mindy's blue CJ5 from MORK & MINDY, I will absolutely grab that one too.

KITT in 1:43 is an expensive car to pick up currently... EBay prices run near or in the triple digits. Instead I picked up this '83 Firebird Trans Am from DeAgostini, which was last months offering in the monthly American Car Collection at the book stores here. They are a little pricey, but far cheaper than the alternatives. I will keep an eye out for an actual KITT and KARR in the future.

So I'm now one of those oversized cars guys. Quite the change from ten years ago when I was still using 1:55.

More Intermodal Containers (and more)

Daiso ¥100 shop run while waiting for Emily. 6 more scaffolds, two not-Mini diecasts, nine concrete pipes, 17 intermodal shipping container tins, and two fake beer can tins.

That brings my total to 48 intermodal containers and 12 scaffolds. I'll pick up two more of the maroon or blue ones if I see them, as that will neatly fill up the shelf cubby I have them stashed in.

Should I be concerned that the back of the diecast car packaging says "keep out of reach of children"?

Foundry Street Violence

Spent the last couple of days basing six packs of Foundry Street Violence minis I ordered last month. The order (which was quickly and efficiently dispatched by the Ansells) consisted of:

• Juno's Crew (SV018)
• Sergei's Corporation (SV024)
• Street Cops (SV031)
• The B Team (SV037)
• The Lovemore Detective Agency (SV057)
• Shotgun Cops (SV065)

The minis required a bit of cleaning, which is to be expected of casts from molds as old as these. If memory serves this line started back in the late 90s and should be old enough to legally order a beer now.

Sergei's Corporation and Juno's Crew, two packs I owned years ago but have since lost or damaged enough to make a reorder prudent, are intended to form the nucleaus of an organized crime force. I definitely want some Russian mobsters and both packs should serve as the core of that force; I will have to experiment with using a pen to add tattoos to the minis's necks and hands. Italian mobsters are also something I will field, but I don't think Juno's crew has the look I want for them... more track suits and guts. I'm thinking more like the guys from The Sopranos, Juno's crew is too hip looking to be goombahs - (which is saying something for twenty-plus year old minis).

My included two packs of uniformed police officers, both six-mini packs. I plan to remove the cast on sleeve patches from each of them, as they aren't placed very well on a number of the minis. Given the 8-point caps I will likely paint these up as NYC-style cops... French blue shirts with dark navy trousers, caps and ties. I may make some water slide decals to use as patches. We will see. Twelve uniforms should be all the police I need to field at any one time, particularly if the are augmented by a couple detectives from the Lovemore packs, or SWAT minis from a future order. The Lovemore Detective Agency is, I believe intended to represent a group of P.I.s but a couple of them are very city detective looking, with what appears to be a detective shield clipped to the belt.

The B Team was picked up to go with one of a pair of 1:50 scale A Team vans I picked up years ago. I have no idea what I will do with the second van yet, but better to have two than only one. Perhaps a Punisher battle van.... hmmm. Anyway this pack is decent, but I must say the new not-A-team minis from Crooked Dice may be better... I havent ordered them yet, but the pics look excellent.

About two years ago I started to switch from washer and token bases back to sports base types. Part of the reason for this was the difficulty in mounting minis with sports tabs. Many newer minis featured much slighted ankles that made it challenging to pin on a base that could be firmly glued to the washer or token.

I found that by creating a void in the slotta base, backed by a 20mm washer glued to the underside, I could get a flush mount for minis with cast on bases. The washer adds some nice weight, and the overall height of the mini is nearly identical to the height of the mini on a token. Additionally slotta bases come in a much wider variety of shapes giving me more options for mounted and motorcycle minis. It also gives a vintage 90's feel to my tabletop that I rather like.

Scaffolding from Daiso

Went back to Daiso on Tuesday to look for more shipping containers. They hadn't restocked, but I did notice these racks intended for displaying diecast cars. They are modular, stackable, and have pin and socket connectors to attach them together end-to-end or even in L shapes.

My immediate thought was of the workers scaffolding you often come across in NYC, assembled over the sidewalk. I think if I remove the cross members on the short ends from a couple to use at street level, I can achieve the same effect by stacking and sliding these up on the sidewalk against buildings on the table top.

I only picked up six, the number of brown decked ones that Daiso had on hand. There are black decked ones as well, but I prefer the contrast, and it's that much less I need to paint. I will probably hit up another Daiso tomorrow looking for more of the brown. 

Cheap 20' Shipping Containers

Went to Daiso with my wife this morning to get some garland to redo the wreaths for the door. As we were browsing the home decor section I noticed these tins that were styled after ConEx/Shipping containers. Eyeballing them at the store I realized they were pretty damn close to 28mm. I bought four to take home and check.

Measurments put them at about 1/53, which is a little smaller than the 1/50 I would prefer, but at ¥100 for fully painted containers that I just need to seal and weather... I am more than willing to overlook the slight reduction of size. They come in two basic liveries, ONE - Ocean Network Express (in pink and light grey variants) and CTNRX "Everything you can imagine is real" (in blue, maroon, and dark green variants). The roof of each is actually the lid and is grooved to allow another one to nest on top. I imagine I might be able to make some craft foam inserts to allow them to double as miniature storage as well - probably a small gang/fireteam of four minis to each container.

So after picking my son up from school I went back and bought all of stock they had. Here they are in all their glory. Think I need more...

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UPDATE: On Tuesday I was working in Kanazawa, where there happens to be another Daiso... so I bought all the containers they had as well. I am currently at 31.

Elevated Train

I began disassembly and priming of one of the two train cars I picked up. I had originally seen these trains at Toys R Us in Matto about nine years ago. They are a deluxe version of a popular line of friction powered train toys that have light and sound effects. These are Hankyu 9000 series trains, a later version of the trains I used to commute when I was an exchange student in Kobe in 1997.

I didn't pick them up at the time because they were about twice the cost of the regular trains in the line. However they recently went OOP and I managed to snag two used ones on the intertubes. I wanted these because of the walk-through cab design that reminds me of the El in Chicago and NYC subway trains.

The intent is to use the bronze-base metal technique to make them look like scuzzy urban trains, then apply some blue striping and grafitti decals, before finishing off with a few washes to dirty them up more. For those not aware, the 'bronze-base' technique is a way to quickly paint tarnished metal by applying a drybrush of aluminum or gunmetal over a bronze basecoat. The peek-through of the bronze creates a rusty or grimy effect in the crevices. I tried this technique out on an Ameri-Towne building I had laying about and was very pleased with the results.

Atenociti's Metro Terminus

I assembled and primed this a while back, but I wasnt satisfied with the poster images supplied with the kit. The downside of speaking Japanese, is that when random text is copied and pasted to make cyberpunk graphics... it bugs me. So today I searched for a some advertising images from the Cyberpunk 2077 video game.

I resized them to the appropriate dimensions in GIMP and printed them on photo paper. The result is a much more appealing bus stop shelter.

Weathered Buildings

This is a tenement from TT Combat. It's not a particularly detailed MDF building, but they are extremely affordable. It went together quickly and I modified the garden appartment to place the balcony away from the street. Basic paint, and then lots of washes. Added some grafitti, both decal and hand drawn.

I also built and painted a few of the Sarrissa Precision South-East Asian building I got. Its just a basic brown undercoat with lots of washes to make them look aged and weathered. Going to cut up some old towels for the thatch roofs.

Patrol Boat, River and two Fiats

Built and painted a PBR from Sarissa Precision today. Modified the roof with some hemp twine covered with crumpled paper sealed with ModPodge. Created a better feeling of canvas over metal supports.

It has some interesting proportions, probably not quite to scale but allowing minis to be placed on the deck. It is missing a forward dual-fifty turret, so I'll have to figure that out. I also changed the order of the rounds for the radar, and sanded the top-edge to make it look more accurate.

While I had the paints out I finished up the windows on two Fiat 500Fs I bought at the car museum years ago.

TTCombat Brownstone

Building the three brownstones/tenements I got from TTCombat. Not a fantastically clever MDF design, but the price is really good.

Anvil Industries Regiments

I got some bits from the Regiments line at Anvil Industries. These really great folks offer a system of interchangable parts (heads, arms, legs, weapins, torsos, accessories) you can use to construct miniatures of a modern, near-future, or even 40k type. The pieces are very finely sculpted and cast in resin. Stylisticly they are similar to the GW style, or Foundry perhaps; weapons tend to be oversized though. What intriqued me was the well developed line of female parts, having a daughter that plays, I'm always on the look out fr female minis that aren't grossly sexist. Anvil offers a line of very comoetent looking females. definitely goung to get more of these.

28mm Civilian Vehicles, Part VI: Mega Bloks

Part six of a continuing effort to document scale-appropriate toy cars for 28mm gaming. In this post we take a look at Lego-type building kits from Mega Bloks, part of their Need For Speed license. The smaller kits, featuring a key-launcher and ~1/55 scale car consisting of a chassis, two 90 degree bend pieces, two doors, a front end, a back end, a roof/pillars/glass piece, and a sun roof or 3-piece police lightbar. The chassis was a standard piece to all, and as such wheelbase is identical (although tread is not due to various sizes spacers on the hubs), as such I've included length as a dimension in determining scale.

Somewhere I have the '11 McLaren MP4-12C kit as well, but I haven't determined which box it's in to measure and photograph - I will include it in a later revision to this post.

(28mm figures from the Northstar "Fistful of Kung-fu" and Copplestone Castings "Future Wars" ranges provided for scale)

2009 Audi R8 Coupé 5.2 FSI quattro
Scale: 1/52 (L: 4435/99.8; WB: 2650/48.0; W: 1904/34.4)
Line: Mega Bloks Need For Speed
Imprint: "Need For Speed / Mega Bloks"

2008 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 (C6)
Scale: 1/55 (L: 4460/81.8; WB: 2685/48.0; W: 1928/36.1)
Line: Mega Bloks Need For Speed
Imprint: "Need For Speed / Mega Bloks"

2010 Chevrolet Camaro (5th generation)
Scale: 1/58 (L: 4840/80.1; WB: 2852/48.0; W: 1920/33.7)
Line: Mega Bloks Need For Speed
Imprint: "Need For Speed / Mega Bloks"

2007 Porsche 911 GT3 (997)
Scale: 1/51 (L: 4427/83.5; WB: 2355/48.0; W: 1808/34.8)
Line: Mega Bloks Need For Speed
Imprint: "Need For Speed / Mega Bloks"

1969 Ford Mustang (custom)
Scale: 1/55 (L: 4762/83.6; WB: 2743/48.0; W: 1821/36.1)
Line: Mega Bloks Need For Speed
Imprint: "Need For Speed / Mega Bloks"

28mm Civilian Vehicles, Part V: more Siku

Part five of a continuing effort to document scale-appropriate toy cars for 28mm gaming. In this post we return to German manufacturer, Siku. Siku cars are usually imprinted with engine and performance statistics; these have been omitted from the profiles in the interest of brevity.

(28mm figures from the Northstar "Fistful of Kung-fu" and Copplestone Castings "Future Wars" ranges provided for scale)

2010 Volkswagen T5 Transporter
Scale: 1/58 (WB: 3000/50.6; W: 1904/33.2)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "1070 / 1338"
Note: while the van pictured is a kombi, a panel van version is also available.

2006 Dodge Charger
Scale: 1/58 (WB: 3048/52.7; W: 1890/32.6)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "Dodge Charger / 1435"

2003 Porsche Cayenne (9PA)
Scale: 1/58 (WB: 2855/48.4; W: 1928/33.3)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "Porsche Cayenne Turbo / 1062"

1980 Mercedes-Benz SEC (C126)
Scale: 1/58 (WB: 2850/47.2; W: 1828/32.4)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "Mercedes Benz 500SEC / 1052"

2008 Toyota Land Cruiser (J200)
Scale: 1/55 (WB: 2850/51.1; W: 1970/36.0)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "Toyota Land Cruiser V8 / 1440"

Siku Hurricane
Scale: N/A (WB: 51.4; W: 37.8)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "Siku Hurricane / 0878"
Note: an original model by Siku, boasting a 7320cc 10 cylinder engine producing 760PS, 559pkW, and 8970U/min - top speed is 321km/h.

28mm Civilian Vehicles, Part IV: Majorette

Part four of a continuing effort to document scale-appropriate toy cars for 28mm gaming. In this post we take a look at models from Majorette, another European manufacturer making many cars with a nominal scale of ~1/55. Newer offerings tend to run closer to 1/64 except for compact and subcompact cars, however older Majorettes tended to be larger and many mid-size cars can be had as well.

(28mm figures from the Northstar "Fistful of Kung-fu" and Copplestone Castings "Future Wars" ranges provided for scale)

2007 Renault Twingo II
Scale: 1/55 (WB: 2365/42.5; W: 1655/30.1)
Line: Majorette
Imprint: "Twingo / Ech: 1/64 / Ref: 206B"

2010 Honda CR-Z (ZF1)
Scale: 1/54 (WB: 2435/44.6; W: 1740/32.7)
Line: Majorette
Imprint: "Honda CRZ / Ech: 1/55 / Ref: 220B"

2008 Renault Scénic III
Scale: 1/58 (WB: 2700/46.5; W: 1844/32.1)
Line: Siku Super Series
Imprint: "Renault Scenic / Ech: 1/64 / Ref: 221F"

2009 BMW Z4 (E89)
Scale: 1/56 (WB: 2496/44.4; W: 1790/32.3)
Line: Majorette
Imprint: "BMW X4 Roadster / Ech: 1/56 / Ref: 244F"

2007 Fiat 500
Scale: 1/55 (WB: 2300/41.8; W: 1627/29.5)
Line: Majorette
Imprint: "Fiat 500 / Ech: 1/55 / Ref: 286C"

1979 Toyota HiLux Third Generation (N30)
Scale: 1/55 (WB: 2585/45.1; W: 1610/30.9)
Line: Majorette
Imprint: "Toyota Pick-up / Ech. 1/56 / No 292"

28mm Civilian Vehicles, Part III: Jada

Part three of an ongoing attempt to catalogue scale-appropriate toy cars for 28mm gaming. Today's selection is from Jada, who make many ~1/55 scale vehicles, mostly sold as 1/64 scale vehicles.

(28mm figures from the Northstar "Fistful of Kung-fu" and Copplestone Castings "Future Wars" ranges provided for scale)

2011 Nissan GT-R (R35)
Scale: 1/54 (WB: 2780/49.4; W: 1902/51.5)
Line: Jada Fast & Furious 1/55
Imprint: "2009 Nissan GTR / Scale 1/55"

2011 Dodge Challenger SRT-8 (off-road)
Scale: 1/57 (WB: 2950/50.9; W: 1920/34.4)
Line: Jada Fast & Furious 1/55
Imprint:"Dodge Challenger SRT8 / Scale 1/55)

1967 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 (off-road)
Scale: 1/54 (WB: 2743/51.6; W: 1842/33.9)
Line: Jada Fast & Furious 1/55
Imprint: "1967 Chevy Camaro / Scale 1/55"

1970 Dodge Charger (off-road)
Scale: 1/58 (WB: 3000/49.0; W: 1950/36.2)
Line: Jada Fast & Furious 1/55
Imprint: "1970 Dodge Charger / Scale 1/55"

1970 Plymouth Road Runner 440 6-Barrel
Scale: 1/57 (WB: 2946/50.3; W: 1941/34.8)
Line: Jada Fast & Furious 1/55
Imprint: "1970 Plymouth Road Runner / Scale 1/55"

1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS396 Hardtop Coupe
Scale: 1/57 (WB: 2845/49.8; W: 1915/34.3)
Line: Jada Fast & Furious 1/55
Imprint: "1970 Chevy Chevelle SS / Scale 1/55"