Sd.Kfz. 7 half-track, post-war

[scottie3158]

Jakko,
That looks great mate and has turned out really well. The only thing I would say and I am probably wrong, would the front wheel rims be yellow or would they be red primer. Would the wheels have been sprayed in top coat before the tyres were fitted?

[adt70hk]

That's looking very good Jakko. Very well done.

[Guest]

typical, you look away for five minutes and somebody is stealing something! :smiling:

Somehow, I think he won’t find much, given that somebody else has already taken things like wheels and spark plugs … I suppose he’s desperate enough to try anyway, though

The only thing I would say and I am probably wrong, would the front wheel rims be yellow or would they be red primer. Would the wheels have been sprayed in top coat before the tyres were fitted?

I thought about that too, but:—



… I think the rims on the ground are those of the Sd.Kfz. 7, and they’re certainly not in red primer. Not sure they are in dark yellow, though bare metal seems unlikely too.

[Graeme C.]

The half track looks superb Jakko, I like the idea of someone taking the last of the fuel, the figure adds an extra bit of interest to the scene.

[Guest]

Now I just need to paint him I’ve gotten rather sidetracked by a Sherman I thought I could build SFTB …

[JR]

Love that last photo with the guy standing looking " Not me gov, didn't touch a thing "

Great piece of work emulating that photo .

[Guest]

After studying the photo some more, I came to the conclusion that the stuff in the back was a wooden crate/box and a length of barbed wire. There are two rolls of what I think is almost certainly barbed wire on the ground beside the vehicle, so a piece left in the load bed would not be strange.

The box was easily made from plastic card:

[ATTACH]448563[/ATTACH]

Though I took off the handles again because you can’t see anything like them on the photo, but the verticals are visible. I added some damage to show a reason why nobody has taken it

The barbed wire was fairly laboriously made. I first twisted two lengths of about 0.25 mm copper wire together, then wound 0.1 mm wire around it to form the barbs (this because German barbed wire often had thicker main wires than that used for the barbs, to make it harder to cut). Rather than wrapping each barb individually, it’s simpler to use a single piece of wire, and use something like a cocktail stick as a spacer between them, forming loops around that:

[ATTACH]448562[/ATTACH]

This is not a job you’ll be doing for fun, I have to say … but it produces far more realistic-looking barbed wire than using etched stuff does. Once I had wrapped the whole length, I had this:

[ATTACH]448564[/ATTACH]

I then painted the whole wire in a gun metal colour, and cut off the loops on both sides, leaving short barbs sticking out.

[ATTACH]448565[/ATTACH]

Though it looks a bit yellow here for some reason, it didn’t in the flesh when I took that photo. Up close:

[ATTACH]448566[/ATTACH]

The reason for painting before cutting the barbs to length, by the way, was to hopefully use the paint to glue the barbs to the wires This seems to have worked, so after that, I added a wash of thinned brown ink and then drybrushed with a light metal colour to bring out the detail.

And then it was just a matter of putting everything together

[Jim R]

A really enjoyable build to follow and judging by 200+ posts others thought so too.
Jim

[Graeme C.]

The barbed wire looks really good Jakko, useful step by step too.

[Guest]

I’ve been making it like that for decades. But very rarely because it’s rather laborious

[JR]

Think the barbed wire alone is worthy of the Dogs.
The last photo showing it finished is so realistic.

[Guest]

That’s before it was fully painted But I agree, it looks good even in a close-up photograph, which is why I prefer to make it myself rather than use etched “wire”, let alone bits cut from fly screen or similar methods that were once common. What I would really like to find, though, is a way to automate it, and also a way to get four barbs together rather than two …