The Long Soak

I saw this excellent Blog post yesterday (on Wargaming with Barks) about a neglected box of fantasy football goblins that he left soaking in Dettol for two years! Admittedly this was unintentional but the results looked pretty good after a little scrub and wash with some turpentine. I recently had a go at stripping old paint from some 6mm Italian Tanks and also used Dettol as my stripper of choice, and the results were OK if not spectacular. I probably could have soaked the models a little longer than I did, but I don't think I have the patience to plan my painting projects two years in advance! 

I now have another batch of models soaking in a tub of liquid oven cleaner. I tried it on some models last week and it worked OK, but no better than the Dettol (although without the smell). With this latest batch I'll soak them for at least a couple of days as I'm working on something else at the moment. I'm not sure if this cheap pound store oven cleaner is the best at cleaning models (I don't know if it contains the Sodium Hydroxide active ingredient) but I'll give it another go before buying something else to try out. The major advantage of this product is that it doesn't stink the house out, and therefore makes it wife friendly!

Another useful pound store acquisition was a set of 2 small watertight snap lock Tupperware boxes. These are ideal for soaking my 6mm models in as I know no smells or chemicals will spill from them. I can just toss in the models, top up with the stripping liquid of my choice and let them soak the long soak safe in the knowledge that no noxious smells will seep out. As my workspace is in the family room such considerations are important if I want to stay on the good side of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

While these 'marinate' I'm painting up some other 6mm British Tanks and Armoured Cars to round off my Heavy Armoured Squadron. Then I really need to switch my focus back to the Germans and some panzer IV F1's I recently bought from Skytrex. Its good to be busy! 

Vigilant, Fastidious & Diligent

I've been getting a lot of Spam lately (Spam as in junk mail not Spam® as in the canned precooked meat product). I've always received a certain amount of spam comments on BLMA but until recently this was a handful each week and easily eradicated. All part of the rich tapestry of the Internet, filtered by Blogger and easily eradicated without it ever reaching the eyes of my readers. But just before Christmas the volume of Spam received on BLMA jumped and has now reached annoying levels. 

Spam Comments are an everyday occurrence for most bloggers and (in my experience) are largely from that ubiquitous Internet user 'Mr Anonymous'. Some are comedy gold having clearly been written by a computer and then translated from Chinese or Russian into a bizarre version of English that has to be read to be believed. But no matter how funny some of these are they all have a sting in the tail, a link that isn't what it appears.

Most of the Spam I have had recently seems to be associated with Internet Gambling sites rather than porn, but very few of the spam comments are honest in their statements. None say "Visit my roulette website here..." and the only real intention of this unsolicited mail is to improved the page ranking of their website by scattering the Internet with back-links. Blogger automatically applies the "nofollow" tag to all comments, so back-links receive no Page Rank boost, but of course that doesn't stop the spam-bot from dumping in your comments folder in the first place. 

A wealth of words! 

My Spam is still largely being filtered and deleted before it reaches the public pages of BLMA but the volume of Spam has increased enormously over the last two months. I now regularly receive a couple of dozen Spam Comments per day and although for the most part it is still being caught by the filters built into Blogger its taking longer every day to eradicate. Despite this I'm not about to activate further security measures just yet. My views on Captchas are well known and I would only resort to these if large amounts of spam were getting past the filter's to the front pages. 

I'll remain "vigilant, fastidious & diligent" and will of course continue hitting the delete button as long as the spam-bots pursue their pointless business of clogging up the Internet with cr*p. But just in case I accidentally delete a genuine comment (thankfully this has only happened a couple of times) please bare with me and re-send your thoughts in. I still value genuine feedback and the vast majority of the conversations that take place on BLMA are conducted by living, breathing gamers with something worthwhile to contribute.

Heavy Armoured Squadron 1942

Over the weekend I was able to focus on the next part of my 1942 North Africa project and painted the core of a British Heavy Armoured Squadron. This consists of three Troops of Grant Tanks and Two of Sherman's. 

British Heavy Armoured Squadron

I have been looking forward to painting these as they include one of my favourite tanks, the M3 Lee/Grant Tank. 

The M3 wasn't a great tank having been rushed through from design to first production models in under a year. But its hull would later go on to form the basis of the M4 Sherman and the lessons learnt on the M3 would shape American tank design for years to come. But for the British crews these were considered wonderful tanks, easy to maintain, roomy, reliable and packing the much needed 75mm duel purpose gun in its side sponson. This meant that for the first time British Armoured Squadrons could use HE rounds and gave them some degree of parity with the German Mark IV's.

There is an excellent example of a 'Desert' Grant at the Imperial War Museum in London. This tank was Field Marshal Montgomery's command tank and the main 75mm gun in the hull is fake.

'Monty' in the IWM London

To support these five troops I have two squadrons of Crusader II's and some AEC I Armoured Cars. I'll start work on these in the next few days. 

Home Made Tanks

Continuing the occasional series of pictures of Toy Soldiers.

Three home made tanks dating from the 1940's. The camouflaged tank looks like a hybrid between a WWI design but with a WWII turret. The maker has put a roller in the base so it moves around easily. The centre tank is made of wood with a more modern design and is dated to 1942. The smaller tank on the right is a classic example of wartime thrift and entrepreneurial spirit as the brother and sister that made this made others as well and sold them to a local toy shop!

These models and many more can be viewed at Bletchley Park and are part of a huge collection of wartime memorabilia.