Overdue delivery from the Panto-Pak arms emporium
Courtesy of some foreign aid, a long time ago, PANTO’s finance minister acquired some artillery from an arms bazaar somewhere beyond the Khyber Pass … you know the story (well you do if you played the old AK47). As the photo shows, they finally got delivered.
January is a month for completing bits and pieces, and those who enjoyed the Christmas AK47 game might have noticed a still glossy toy shop truck and some bare MDF showing as the Afghan lorries rolled into treaty organisation territory …
Not any more.
(click on the image to enlarge)
The guns are PP 105s, and the crews a mix of PP AK figures and Pirates with appropriate heads (there are some ‘shirts off’ figures in the pirate range, so good to adapt as artillerymen).
The guns and bases are my usual metal shimmed with magnabase on the crew-base and tows arrangement, and have been done for some time. Finishing the tows has been overdue (long overdue).
The truck is a toy shop job of that indeterminate size, which has finally had a proper strip, prime and dry brushing applied and now looks a lot better.
The armoured tow with crane has been pressed into service by Panto-Pak (the arms procurement and delivery NGO). They got it in some dodgy surplus deal after it was withdrawn from its original role as a missile unit carrier/reloader. They found it much more useful as an armoured crane.
It has a chequered history … Panto-Pak got it from this guy (link), who got it from this guy (link), who might be related to this guy (link), and it probably all goes back to this man (link) … Not sure I’d buy second-hand cars from the last two. It went into action on the President’s Birthday – and immediately got commandeered by a local warlord. Well, it was Christmas …
It is a slimmed-down mintanks model (M113 variant) with some adaptation. There is more coming on the modelling page (here …).
Also just delivered …
The Gebirgsjaeger got their flak battalion kitted out …
Motorised FlakArtillerie
This is a porteed 20mm on the back of a PP Steyr truck. Although I see the main function being in operational games, I am an inveterate fiddler, so have provided the option of dismounting the gun.
The gun is cobbled together from parts of a minitanks flak gun and a (I think) QRF and PP figure, all from the junk boxes. Looks good enough to my eyes for all that …
And I’ve also added a 1-tonne Landy and an Alvis Stalwart from QRF to the AK47 motor pool.
Both of these were bought some years ago on a whim (the ‘Stolly’ is one of those favourites from all the way back when I had one of the BP Exploration Matchbox ones as a child …)… but turned out to be a bit fiddly (so got set to one side … you know that story, too, I expect).
The Stalwart is due for UN livery (but I’ll leave the badging until the next game just in case I end up using it for something else).
(Review and a couple more pics about to go up on the Reviews page)
QRF Alvis Stalwart
