Warbases 28mm Zhu House

I'm continuing with my Chinese terrain build; this time it's a building from Warbases' 55th Day-China line. The Zhu house kit seemed most similar to a wooden Chinese house, so I opted to forgo my usual brick texture and find some wood paneling online.

I didn't have any large wood panel images in my collection so had to perform an online search. Textures.com proved a good source, and I found some wood planks that I thought would fit the bill. Normally I would print these textures out using a good laser printer, but with the Covid restrictions, I only had access to my home inkjet printer. Sadly the images weren't as crisp and the colors not as vibrant, but I think it still gave a reasonable result.  

The kit was built as standard, expect for the addition of the paper textures (including window frames on the lower portion) and the plastic roof tiles from Plastruct (part 91666).  The fit tolerances were very tight on this building, and just the thickness of the paper was enough to cause some gaps on the MDF wood framing. I also had issues with the roof fit being too tight, and ended up having to shave the end caps to keep it from scraping the paint off the building.  The trickiest aspect was trying to fit the plastic tiles to the curved roof. I bent the tile strip at three places using a steel ruler edge to try and pre-shape it, but it still required several clamps and a generous helping of superglue to hold it down.

To hid the tile gaps and provide a more finished look, bit of plastic tubing was added to the top of the roof lines.

The kit does break apart so you can put figures on both floors, but again, the fit was really tight and the floors don't separate easily.

As with my other Warbases build, the doors were a bit on the low side for Copplestone figures on thick bases, but it was nothing egregious.

While I'd wait for laser printer access before again trying to print large texture sheets, I think the end result still came out decent, and the kit itself is one I can recommend.

Another Dragonfrog Asian Shop

The push to keep assembling buildings for my Chinese hutong project continues. This is another 28mm MDF kit from Dragonfrog Games. Its a combination of the shop 4 and 5 kits, with my usual upgrades of printed textures, card, and bits of plastic detailing from Plastruct and Evergreen Scale Models.

The height of the upper story window frames caused some spacing issues when applying the plastic trim, so my attempt to hide the seams between floors wasn't as successful as on my other shops.  However, I don't think it will be too noticeable when looking down at the gaming table.

As with the other shops, the building can be opened up by floor (though the attic level is too short for standing figures).

I also made another error with the shopfront tiles, forgetting to take into consideration the lower portion of the window frames when measuring. I trimmed the bottoms off to compensate, and just have to hope the design looks intentional. 

Below is the actual storefront in Penang, Malaysia that inspired mine.  Though I will primarily will use this for China, I also plan to start playing the Malaysian campaign now that I have a South Asian British force for WW2.

If you would like the architectural details for your own projects, feel free to use the files below.

 

28mm Chinese Ruins for Bolt Action

 I needed a bit of a break from the Burma project, so decided to return to my slowly developing Chinese urban project for WW2 and Back of Beyond gaming. 
 

This block of terrain is a set of ruins built from some of the 4Ground Stalingrad modular ruins range. While the kits can be built without any further painting, I opted to make a fair amount of modifications to up the visual appeal and have the finished product better blend in with my other Chinese buildings.  

To give the flooring a more damaged look, I opted to cover it with sections of distressed balsa wood. These were painted a medium brown to mimic stained wood and further emphasize the damaged portions.   The flooring and interior walls were also hit with some drybrushing and washes to further add to the worn look of the ruins. At this time the modular sections were also glued together, as I wanted a unified exterior to the building and planned to fill the interior with rubble. 

This kits come with an outer layer of grey card that I assume is to mimic the look of concrete, but I opted to cover these with my standard Scalescenes OO model railroad brick scaled to 120%.  I left a fair amount of overhang on the paper so it could be wrapped the edges of the completed walls (already underpainted with an appropriate brick color).

For ease of play, I opted to have standing walls on only 2 of the 4 sides, and to fill the rest with rubble. I thought a nest in the rubble to use as a base or artillery position would be fun, so built a loop of sandbags out of the Renedra kit. They weren't as easy to use as I had hoped, with some poor fits that needed to be trimmed or filled with putty, and repetitive bag patterns. I did my best to hide most of the sins on the outside as I new that would be covered by the rubble.

With the building and sandbags glued to an appropriate base, I started to build the rubble piles out of carved sheets of foam. 

These were given a coat of appropriately colored paint, and pieces of brick paper were glued in irregular orientations. While not critical to have the paper covering every part, I find it particularly useful on steep sides where the debris may not stick as densely. The debris itself is a mix of various rock sizes and colors, along with some 1:48 bricks from Juweela, glued down with a thick coat of white school glue.

Here is the wall side of the kit. Various dirty washes have been run over the brick paper (previously sealed with matte enamel varnish to help prevent warping) and the billboard for insect spray. To add further wear to the billboard, I rubbed a wet finger over some sections to rub off the image and expose the white underneath. The door that leads to the sandbag emplacement has been fortified with additional sandbags.

And here is the collapsed side with the built in sandbag nest. It's large enough that it can house a complete squad, medium tank, or artillery emplacement. The perimeter has been edged with two layers of weathered GaleForce Nine barbed wire for additional security. Lastly, I've also created some independent rubble elements to allow the destruction to spill off the base and into the street.

Customized Diecast Vehicles for 28mm China Wargaming Part 2

I'm back with some more customized Lledo Days Gone vehicle for  28mm Back of Beyond and WW2 Chinese wargaming.  Part 1, which also covers decal creation, can be found here.

For this round, I used several promotional  vehicles:  Hershey's Chocolate, Standard Oil, and a local wholesale company, J J Brodsky & Sons. The last vehicle only had stickers instead of decals, so I stripped them off at the start.  Sadly some paint came off with them.

DG20 Ford 1934 Model A Stake Truck

This truck took its inspiration the Sean You Zoo factory vehicles from Hangchow.  The included barrels can be popped out of the bed, so I too the opportunity to drybrush them and paint in a wooden floor for the truck bed. 

Source: Madspace.org

Source: Madspace.org

DG16 Dennis 1934 Parcels Van

This van was based off a van from the Tai Chong furniture company out of Shangai. As mentioned previously, the van had suffered some paint damage during preparation, so the weathering was really ramped up to hide that. I think this particular vehicle was slightly undersized when compared to the other two, but it's still not too bad looking.

Source: Madspace.org

DG18 Packard 1936 Van

This particular customization was a completely original idea. When I saw the announcer horns, it reminded me of old election/political rally vehicles, so I though it would be perfect to roam the streets and whip up patriotic fervor for the Kuomintang and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

The size of these vehicles were again comparable to the Warlord Games 1/56 Morris 15cwt Truck.

As before, I am including the decal designs here for personal use, but they are not allowed to  to be sold.

Customized Diecast Vehicles for 28mm China Wargaming

 I wanted some more scatter terrain for my Back of Beyond and WW2 Chinese wargaming, so I though some appropriate 1920's and 1930's vehicle would fit the bill nicely. 1/56 civilian vehicles designed for 28mm wargaming are hard to come by, so your best bet is to look for diecast cars and trucks that are relatively close in scale (as I did for VBCW).  As I only knew of one truck specifically intended to represent a vehicle of that era in China, so conversions of American and British branded vehicles were called for.

First up was the aforementioned ready to use truck, a Matchbox Yesteryear Tsingtao Great Beers of The World 1920 AC Mack (YGB23).

For modifications, I only weathered it and added some clear plastic for a windshield. It was nicely detailed for a toy truck and cost me around $15 US with shipping. No scale was listed on the box, but collector sites have given it a nominal scale 1/60, so fairly close to target.   When compared to a Warlord Games' 1/56 Type 97 Isuzu truck, they looked reasonable together.

Next up were some Lledo Days Gone vehicles that seemed suitable for conversion.  The Lledo cars were not as detailed as their Matchbox rival, but at $7-10 US with shipping, they were a good deal (with lots of color variants to choose from).

In addition to weathering and added windshields, I decided to update these with customs decals based on period photos from Shanghai. I had never made custom decals before, so did a lot of online research in hopes of not completely screwing it up.  For what I wanted to do, it appeared white decal paper was going to be more useful than the clear version. I tried locating the Testors paper in the US, but could find nowhere selling it (and it's proprietary sealant) for a reasonable price. In the end, I went with Sunnyscopia inkjet decal paper from Korea (available on Amazon).  It's a general crafting decal sheet rather than one specially designed for model makers, but the price was right for experimenting.

Some of the reviews cited problems with the images bleeding when submerged in water, or decals not releasing easily from the backing.  I experienced none of these issues after following the directions.  I printed my decals at 300dpi photo quality on an HP Deskjet 1510 and gave them one hour to dry before spaying them with Rust-Oleum Universal Clear Topcoat Satin. I chose satin over gloss, as it was easier to see where the spray had landed on the glossy paper.  The Rust-Oleum wasn't designed for model makers either, so the spray mist wasn't as fine as I would have liked.  This made me nervous about good coverage, so I ended up applying 4 coats (5 minutes in between), rotating the paper for each application. The decal paper was allowed to sit for one hour, then dried with a hair dryer on low for 5 minutes.

The application was rather straightforward, with the decals releasing easily from the backing (though they did have a tenancy to curl in the water), and able to stick to the glossy paint (I didn't pretreat the vehicles with anything). The one major thing to be aware of with these decals is that the film was much thicker than professionally made decals. As such, you could see and feel the decal edges after application.  It may be less obvious with the clear version, but the edges of the white backed decals required touching up when printing darker colors. The white of the decals was also not completely opaque, so if you had large areas of white on your decal, it's best if you had a uniform color underneath it.

DG51 Chevrolet 1928 Box Van 

For this van, I didn't find an image of a particular vehicle, but used a reference photo of a sandbag emplacement being built in front of a Shanghai market in 1937.

Source: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 

DG56 Ford 1930 Model A Raised-Roof Van

Though the Lledo van was already marked with Standard Oil livery, I opted to convert it over to the Chinese branding seen in this image from 1931. Standard started the Atlas tire brand in the 1930's, and though I don't know if they were sold in China, I decided to keep the sign.

Source: Madspace.org

DG13 1934 Model A Ford Van

Sin Wan Pao (新聞報) was a Chinese newspaper firm in operation from the 1890's to the 1940's.

Source: Virtualshanghai.net

I have not be able to find a scale guide for the various Lledo vehicles, But I think these models looked reasonable with a Copplestone Chinese figure and against a Warlord Games 1/56 Morris 15cwt Truck.

One additional Lledo vehicle I purchased that did not look good for 28mm wargaming was the DG42 1934 Mack Tank Truck. It should have been similar in size to my Matchbox Mack, but was woefully undersized.

As I think the 1934 Mack variants share parts, I would avoid all of these.

Overall, these came out much better than I thought they would.  I've placed some eBay orders for additional Lledo vehicles, so fingers crossed they will look good as well.  If you would like to do any conversions yourself, here's the decal designs I made.  They are free for personal use, but I don not give permission for them to be sold.

Added 30Aug20: Part 2 of my conversions can be found here.