Gaz Truck and barricades for Spanish Civil War

So a few weeks ago Martin decided to paint a T-26 model he had in his collection in Spanish Civil War Nationalist colours, and then one thing led to another, and before long the group had committed to doing the SCW in 20mm, using Osprey's A World Aflame.

Martin is doing the lion's share of the work, and for my part I am painting up thirty-plus Republican militia, a truck, and a few barricades.

Now one thing that struck me when I looked at photos and videos from the SCW is jst how many sandbags were used. Streets, walkways, and windows were all blocked by walls of sandbags. There were also many photos and footage of road barricades made from stone or concrete blocks.

We realised that to reproduce the battelfields of the SCW, we would need lots of sandbags and barricades.

I managed to find some 1/72 scale sandbags I had from a WW2 model kit, but I quickly found that stacking sandbags to even chest height required a large number of them. To maiximise the number of barricades I could produce, I decided to make some of the stone/concrete barricades by chopping up some plastic sprues I had and then stacking and gluing them together, before topping them with my remaining sandbags. The whole process takes too long to be efficient, so I will have to relook at my options.

Also as part of my contribution to the project, I wanted to paint up a truck. The A World Aflame rules have an interesting rule where your units may run out of ammunition and will need to replenish them from a cache. A truck would make a suitable representation of the cache, and can of course be used as transport, or just as scatter terrain or table dressing.

Minairons Miniatures, which we are getting our figures from, produce a couple of truck models, but these are made of resin and quite costly. I decided instead of get the cheapest Soviet Gaz truck I could find off ebay, and ended up with a Military Wheels model. Unfortunately, the quality of the kit was quite disappointing. The plastic was brittle, and there was a lot of flash on the parts. I assembled the bare minimum parts to get the basic shape of the vehicle up, leaving out much of the undercarriage.

I sprayed the finished model white, and then before the white paint dried completely, I sprayed on a thick coat of Tamiya Olive Drab. This gave an uneven finish and some pitting, and an interesting results where the colour on each panel faded towards the edge, and as the paint dried there was some sort of discolouration where some parts were more brown than green. This gave the model a sun-bleached appearance which I was quite pleased with.

I then gave the model a black and then brown wash, and brushed on some light brown as mud on the tyres and the lower parts of the chassis.

All in all it is not a model that will stand up to close scrutiny, but for gaming purposes it should suffice.