Painted pieces, Expansion rules

Been a while since I painted but I got the psycho paint brush and all of the Japanese units I wanted from HBG so now I will begin my goal of finishing the Japanese Air Force. Here is how I will be painting the Tony fighters. It was my first attempt at this level of detail and it will take some fine tuning but I am happy with the first one.

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If you are really looking for a good finish on all your HBG pieces, you could buy a couple small cans of differing lacquers and test each one. $20 should get almost 3 cans worth. It may be a waste to some degree, but at least you can know for sure which one works best.

I have a flat Testors lacquer/sealant spray that I used on Tall Paul’s finished pieces. Granted, these were painted first, so the effect may be thrown off. However, I will say that I did not observe any level of gloss on the HBG or OOB pieces after I applied it. It was quite flat as advertised. FWIW.

I have opened my Airfix and find that, although the base/pedestal is shorter, the pieces are of a height with those produced by HBG. I’d feel comfortable using them on my board. My big concern is that the plastic is very soft, and some pieces so finely molded that you’re almost certainly looking at damage-in-storage, if not straight out of the box. They can also be a pain to cut cleanly from sprues, resulting in damaged to pieces during removal.

HaT pieces are in much harder plastic – so hard, it’s brittle. They are noticeably beefier than Airfix pieces in the same scale, but about as tall. I got a Serbian WW1 pack.

Waterloo 1815 miniatures in 1:72 scale are taller, also brittle, and beefier still, but are also acceptable. Sprues for special molds (e.g., machine gunners) are fiddly, creating risk of damage to pieces during clipping.

This may sound like an improbable source, but another idea would be for you to go to some local dollar stores and look around.  Back when I was making myself a dice tower, I discovered that some dollar store chains sell (among all the miscellaneous stuff they have in stock) some plain unpainted rectangular wooden trays of various sizes, made of very thin wood.  Their designs could not be simpler – a bottom and four sides glued together, all made of flat wooden pieces – and they’re cheap in both price and appearance, but they’re about the right size for what you have in mind and they would probably look quite nice if you applied some dark wood stain to them.  And because they’re so inexpensive, picking up as many as you need for your table would be very affordable.  It would also be easy to customize them by, for example, subdividing the larger models into sections by cutting some balsa wood sticks (or other types of woods) to suitable sizes and gluing them inside the trays before you stain them.

The best approach I’ve seen was a friend who cut his factories in half with a hacksaw. Large factories are majors, while the smaller, halved factories are minors.

I’ve got mine painted three different colors. Bought a lot of 50 for a few dollars from a vendor at Nashcon in May 2016.

Before Nashcon, I used red Monopoly hotels for the major factories and the green hotels for minor factories. I still like to use the green ones every now and again because I think they’re nifty.

––Calling “Viracocha”----

––My friend,…it’s been way too long since I’ve heard from you. I ALWAYS enjoy my conversations with you.

Tall Paul

@Albert:

@Spitfire38:

I have looked at I-94’s decals and thought about it… the only ones I have trouble with are the Russian stars. I enjoy hand painting the insignia and I feel like it makes it look more uniform when it’s all paint, but like you said, it would definitely save some time  :lol:

Well you could save some effort there as Moscow ordered upper wing stars to be painted out on the eve of the German invasion……plain green was also changed to green with a black disruptive camo pattern   http://mig3.sovietwarplanes.com/index.html

I didn’t know that they painted over the top-wing stars. Thanks for sharing! If I were to paint them again, I’d probably leave them on or use decals, just for easy recognition on the game board, but I like knowing what was historically accurate.

Thank you Paul. These all look very cool. Looks like I have a few options.

Jon