Saturday 17 October 2020

Rapid Fire! Dieppe 1942 in 20mm (part 3) - The last Churchills of the Calgary Tank Regiment


The mailman arrived with these two on friday and the OMG project suffered an halt. Nothing that OMG is not used to with so many delays along Hell's Highway and all those bridges. 

With these two Churchill III I finish the Calgary Tank Regiment. This was a unit I wanted to do since childhood. I remember reading the old threee volumes of The Reader's Digest WW2 and getting hooked to the pictures and to a nice map of the attack. One more page closes in my "Wish I could do it" calendar.

The models are Dragon pre-built Kits bought from Clive Dudley friendly and fast service and they take two minutes to put together. In fact you just need to take them out of the box and they are ready. These are different from the more usual die-cast models of Altaya or Amercom as they are the same plastic kits of the brand built and beautifully painted. Not cheap but the end result is great. They become very light and the brand usually places a metal bolt inside for extra weight.

The colours matches my own Hasegawa MkI and Mk II pretty well which was a true relief. 


The only change I made was in the turret markings as the original ones are very small, maybe some three times smaller as they should and new handpainted ones were made. For not having two Beefys this one became Bert, the Churchill III that was photographed closer to the Casino. 

From here you can see the beautiful original painting of the models using the main tone first, dirting with diluted black all crevices and then drybrushing the main tone + white. This is also my way of painting tanks (the only difference is that these are better painted) and they fit very well next to the Hasegawa ones.


In the meantime I changed the turret symbol colours to dark and light blue as the yellow was wrong.

 Next: before the mailman arrives I´ll built a Revell´s 21Cm Mörser 18 for Normandy. 

6 comments:

  1. Excellent addition. You are much further ahead on your Dieppe project than I am,

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    1. For me became easier as I stole your ideas. So a big thank you and congratulations on your beautiful models.

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  2. Excellent x 2. And I’m surprised to learn we paint tanks in the same way. I prime in black or dark brown, slap on the main colour, wash with black/brown then build up with a mix of block painting and dry brushing. People think I airbrush but the only can involved is the primer! Yours have the same effect and I thought they were airbrushed too!

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  3. Thanks Jeffers. The only difference is the primer, I use grey.

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  4. These finished models are superb. I really enjoyed your early posts about the conversions to produce these (and others).
    Regards, James
    (Really pleased to have been 'introduced' to your blog by that marvellous referral system of a link on another's!—une soixante douze in this case).

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  5. Thanks James. I get completely distracted with the next thing I'm doing, in this case for Normandy 1944. I have some 10 or 15 preferred periods and I'm always hoping from one to another.

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