Sarissa precision Horsa glider

Unfortunately, having a 3 three year old in the house, and having to work from home (I'm a teacher) isn't giving me quite the time that other people seem to have to work on their hobby during the coronavirus lockdown, but actually, I'm OK with that. If I was doing it all day every day I would burn out! That said, I do have a few updates that I should have been putting on here, so now is a good time to do so.

My first one is putting together a horsa glider for a British airborne force for Bolt Action, or maybe Chain of Command if I ever get around to buying the rulebook...

The glider itself is the 1/56 MDF and card kit from Sarissa Precision. I approached this with no small level of trepidation, as I find MDF kits need quite a bit of working to get them looking good, and this was by far the most complicated laser-cut kit that I have tackled.
And indeed, it was tricky, but not overly so. I have been using Roket card glue to put it together rather than PVA, and I think this has been a lifesaver. If I had had to brace things while waiting for PVA I may have lost it and just binned the damn thing altogether.

First you assemble to cockpit, and then the main fuselage of the glider begins with putting support rings around a central floor.

I made a couple of slight mistakes, both made by not paying attention to the precise order of the instructions. My advice for this kit is to do things in exactly the order you are instructed to! I have to chop a piece off the central support for the cockpit, and prise apart the second from top fuselage ring in the picture above as the lugs didn't line up. Thankfully neither of these issues were sufficient to screw the build up entirely.

The door was another tricky moment, and required pulling apart. Due to the way the hinges work, you need to assemble it attached to the fuselage. Again though, not the end of the world.
My biggest bugbear with the kit, however, is the score marks in the skin. It's an impressive piece of design work, but I definitely did not want those lines across the finished model. So, I did a little research and took an idea from the chap over at wargamesandrailroads (whose Horsa build can be found here) and covered the bugger in diall pre-mixed filler.

I applied it as smoothly as I could with my finger, and then sanded it down with some fine grit sandpaper... and it's not come out too bad. Fairly smooth, and I think I applied it thick enough that I didn't end up sanding the card itself.  I've chucked on some Galeria black acrylic paint as that filler would have just soaked up spray primer;

and I think she's looking fairly sexy. There was a huge gap between the wings and the fuselage, so I've filled that in too, but at the expense of being able to fully disassemble the model. This is going to be a sod to store now, but a good looking model > storeability in my opinion.

I still need to detail the interior of the ramp a little, and maybe make some extensions so the ramp comes down the floor, but other than that I think she's ready to take some paint! This has gone on the backburner for the moment, though, as I need to get some masking tape, and bottles of the right colours, so in the meantime I have been painting up the finishing models for my British force, and the non-rank and file elements of the Germans.
My next post will be showing off the brits, and I'll wait until I have something more interesting than rank and file for the Germans before I post them up.
I also have plans in the works for a dark ages pallisade and Strathclyde Welsh warband for Saga, so plenty to keep me occupied while the world is going to hell!

Sarissa Precision English timber-framed farmhouse.

My current project is WW2 Europe. This is partially because most of the non-40k specific terrain I have is from my previous SAGA efforts, and consists largely of fields, woodland, river, and some bogs, most of which should be completely reusable for this theatre as well. The grub huts and long houses however, probably won't be quite as suitable. To remedy this, I decided I need a small farm as I have plans to work through the scenarios in the Battleground Europe Bolt Action theatre book. I looked at various options, including scratchbuilding one, but considering that I hadn't scratch built anything larger than a fence since my teenage years I felt that I should buy an MDF one and detail it instead.

I decided on one of Sarissa's English timber framed farmhouses. I felt that the style of building was fairly common throughout Europe, not just England, and with a few tweaks and a bit of hand waving it could pass for pretty much anywhere on the western front. I've also frequently had daydreams about an ECW project so I may as well have one eye on multitasking the building in the future. Anyway, I bought one for the paltry sum of £15 (they can be found here; https://www.sarissa-precision.com/Farmhouse/p1603368_14211456.aspx) and set to work. I removed the paper from a load of foamboard, clad the house in the resulting foam sheet, and set to work with ruler, coffee stirrers stolen en masse from my local mega-corp coffee house, and a tube of gel superglue.

I tried to keep a lot of the original details, such as the brickwork, from being lost under the cladding by scribing it into the foam, but reduced the number of timbers because it was making it look a bit crowded. I also decided not to replicate the curved timbering, not only because it would be a complete pain in the arse to do, but also because curved timbering is actually a pretty rare feature (but mainly because it would be a pain in the arse). I almost replaced it with some diagonal beams, but decided not to for the sake of a simple life.

In an attempt to get as many different levels or layers into the facade as I could, I decided that the doors needed to be brought forwards a bit as they sat very deep, and at the same level as the windows, so a few small offcuts of wood were used to bring them outwards a bit.

My accidental attempt a noir-ish chiaroscuro effect.

This fugly solution does start to preclude any detailing inside the building, but I've decided against going all out on the interior anyway. (This is partly because I am sure that the Mrs would start making loud and derogatory comments about why I was playing with a dolls house. She's delightful like that, is the Mrs.) I'd rather have it empty and playable than littered with chairs and suchlike, and there is no way on earth I am crazy enough to start building stairs to fit inside. Not yet, anyway.

My first attempt at tiling the roof using individually cut shingles looked cartoony as the tiles were too big, so I ripped them off and started again with ones half the size. There's about 700 of the buggers on there, and it took a full days work to apply them all, but I'm pleased with the outcome.

This lefts me with the smaller details to sort out, like door handles and chimney pots before painting can begin. I made these out of milliput and attached them with superglue.

I decided against window ledges as I didn't like the first one I did, but in hindsight I wish I had lined the windows as the texture of the foamboard shows through and doesn't look very nice, particularly as the windows are so deep due to the cladding. Anyway, it was paint time, and it took me a couple of evenings to complete, and then an hour or so to put in some windows made from a laminated pouch with nothing in it, and laminated into a clear sheet. These don't really show as well as I would like, again due to the depth of the windows, so this is something I will have to address on the next build.

Here's the paint recipe, so hopefully I can replicate it at a later date.

Infill panels: VMC dark sand and highlighted with VMC pale sand, with a touch of army painter soft tone around the edges of the panels and highlighted again to soften the edges.
Brick work: 60/40 VMC chocolate brown / CIT evil sunz scarlet, drybrushed with CIT deathclaw brown, and a wash of VMC pale sand between the bricks.
Roof: Galeria black, followed by 70/30 VMC german grey / CIT evil sunz scarlet, and varying drybrushes of CIT brown, VMC green grey, VMC german field grey, and a final highlight of 60/40 CIT deathclaw brown.
Timber: VMC german grey, drybrush VMC beige brown, and the doors have a final drybrush of 60/40 VMC beige brown and VMC pale sand.

I learned a lot from this project, and I hope to carry those things forwards into my next build. I'm looking at scratchbuilding a shed, and modifying a sarissa timber barn in much the same manner. I also have my eye on the large Sarissa village church, and am considering scribing the stonework into DAS clay to avoid cladding the whole thing in foamboard and adding even more width and screwing up the set of the roof, but it seems like it might be a bigger job than I want. I certainly want to get the farm finished before I start anything mad, as well as about 24 feet of walls and hedgerows. I will probably pick up a few Sarissa bits when I go to Broadside next month, and my plans always end up fluid anyway, so god knows. Whilst it has provided many hours of amusement for £15, I'm still quite glad to get this farmhouse off my table and get back to painting Germans for a little while!