Panzerfähre across the river Seine

The Defeat of the German Panzerarmee 1944
After D-Day, the German Panzers knew only one way, the way back. The positive aspect was, it made the supply line shorter, the bad point was a lot of bridges and railway lines were destroyed either by the US-Air Force or by the French Résistance.
The idea to build a diorama with a German Panzergruppe on a ferry, came as I found an article about the German retreat from France. During the return the Germans had to pass over a lot of rivers. One major problem was the river Seine.
In one of my French magazines, there were some nice pictures of the different types of ships the Germans used. Actually you could say, everything able to swim, was used.
From local ferries up the several German MFP (Marine Fährprahm) everything was more than welcome.
As the maximum seize of any of my dioramas is related to the shoe boxes I use for later storage, the size would be 21 x 27 cm, or just DIN A4. (Very similar to the American Letter size)
So I wanted to show a ferry coming to the banks, where the Panzers would wait.
For the Panzers I decided to go with some Panthers.
Besides the German tank crew from Preiser, everything else is from Dragon.
The Panthers got some add-ons as radio antennas, side protections, and some spare wheels on their turrets. The side protection is made with thin plastic sheets, the radio antennas are taken from a brush. All trees are hand-made. For the water surface I used acrylic paint from the local home depot.

The ferry is hand-made too, I searched some time on the internet for pictures of old ferries and together with the pictures from that french magazine I made some hand sketches how it should look. The basic is just a piece of wood, covered with some plastic sheets.

One year Tea and Tank Blog

Today it is one year ago that I started with this blog. In the meantime more than 600 people stopped and took a look. So I have to say thanks for taking a look at my blog.

As I saw that a lot of the first posts no longer work, I'm in the process to update them all. I hope I will be able to find all the original pictures I had posted before.

Hetzer on the hunt

I found some nice cases, perfectly to build a small diorama for one or two tanks.

So I put as a foundation, a small piece of foam inside and together with some small trees and a bit of grass and mud the diorama is done.

For the first impression take a look at the picture.

Weekend Pleasure in 1:144

Here two pictures of a Mini-Diorama I built the last weekend.

Nothing special, just something you can use to take a picture of a small tank or truck.

The foundation is made out of plaster of Paris; the rest is from what I had on my workbench.

The frame is one of those small picture frames you can buy for some dollars.

So at the end you get a small diorama for less than USD 5.

Puma-Meeting Somewhere in France in 1944

Once I received my own Pumas from the Panzer Depot, I knew that I needed to build a diorama. Nearly at the same time I got the first German tank crew from German company, Preiser.

So my idea was to build a scene somewhere in France. The Pumas would meet with their commander to get new orders. As a foundation, I decided to go with a wooden picture frame from the big “I”.

The ground is a piece of Styrodur or better kwon in the USA as blue foam. I shaped the terrain with several tools until I had the feeling it would work. The meeting point was a kind of an intersection of two small roads.

I pained everything with brown color, before I clued the grass and the sand on it. For the road I went with some dirty powder I took from a road not far where I live.

For the fence I took small toothpicks. All trees and the green is made with stuff I had at hand. 

German fortification somewhere in Italy

Here I will show you a picture of one of my dioramas I left in Switzerland.

While it is very well known that the Germans built Bunkers in France (Atlantic wall), in Denmark, the Nederland and in Germany itself, it is not so well known, that they built a lot of Bunkers in Italy.

Besides the Gustav line or the Hitler line, which were more field fortifications, the Germany had strong bunkers on different locations.

 The diorama is complete made out of foam. The dimensions of the bunker are based on other bunkers I have and on some drawings I found on the Internet.

Airplane built the easy way

For all like me, who do not like to build a complete airplane I present here a nice idea.

I found this last weekend when we visited the USS Hornet in Alameda CA.

On the middle deck they had two of these trailers to transport only parts of an aircraft. If this is the original idea behind I do not know but I liked it.

For all who like ships I can only say, go and visit the Hornet, even the ship is no longer in the conditions of world war II, is is still very impressing to see a lot of the rooms, the flight deck and the tower.

Here a link for google map: http://g.co/maps/uw25x


Here the homepage of the ship:
http://uss-hornet.org/