A10 Cruiser Tanks For The Desert

I have been really slack this year when it comes to fresh gaming output. I had the big burst of Italian Wars at the start of the year which burnt me out a little, so with this year's Analogue Hobbies Winter Paint Challenge about to start I needed to get back in the saddle, warm up the Pro Arte Sable and start to splash the Vallejo again.

This year I have decided to have a tank theme and try and crack through the huge backlog of 28mm Early War desert vehicles I have lying around in the to do box (I say box I mean small garage). First thing was to get a bit of pre season training in with a couple of A10 Tanks I needed for our next Op Compass Campaign Game.

The vehicles are from Warlord Games and will join another 3 A10s that I already own. The vehicles are painted in the early war Caunter Scheme as most of my vehicles are, I've gone for a very pale blue grey for my third colour on these. I have given up debating Caunter Colours and stick to my own interpretation, I have vehicles in the official colours (the earliest) and then others with various shades representing my interpretation of the colour change / fade for the third colour.

There is also a (shock, horror !) conversion on one of the vehicles, it sounds big and clever but all I have done is taken a 3" CS barrel from a Rubicon Models Crusader it (cheers Steve 👍) and replaced the two pounder barrel on the original model to get a Close Support version, which is required for the game mentioned above.

It's nice to get a couple of new vehicles finished and hopefully this will get me in the mood for the challenge. After all looking at the pic below I have 11 Honeys, 4 A13s, 7 Crusaders, a Matilda, 5 Panzer III, 2 Panzer IV, an 8 rad, 3 Sdkfz 222, a Panzer II, 3 Mark VI Light Tanks, 3 Italian M13/40 tanks and 6 M11/39 tanks to be going on with.

The plan past year during the Challenge was to complete a small unit of 6 Cavalry each week to keep me driving forward, it worked a treat. This year I plan a minimum of 3 vehicles each week, so there are more than enough in these boxes to keep me going.

I only started playing around with weathering of vehicles a year or so ago so I'm quite new to it, there are some washes, some chipping and a bit of streaking on these, I don't want to go too far with it (some models are all weathering and no paint) but I'm happy with my progress.

The vehicles are due in action straight away so will have the opportunity to perform dreadfully (as all new units must) pretty soon.

So the wing table will be mostly empty for the next couple of weeks whilst I get this lot cleaned up, washed, dried, built and primed ready for the start of the challenge on the 21st December. See you at the start line.