A trip to Model Zone

So, on Saturday, while looking for "something nice" to bring back for my wife while I was shopping for a new pair of work shoes, I ambled into Model Zone to discover it was in administration. As such, I stopped window shopping trying to work out what scale of toy cars I should buy to weather and add guns and armour to in order to play Dark Future without my heart going into my mouth every time someone looked at one of the original cars, and set about putting a few pounds across their counters in the vain hope it will persuade a buyer to come forward and pick them up.

As it is, there are a number of excellent products they stock that are definitely worth you heading down to pick things up. Their discounts are currently between 10% and 30%, except for Hornby and Scalextric stock (as it is operating as a concession within Modelzone).

The first thing I'd recommend to the average war gamer is the Tamiya range. They stock the paint range, which is excellent (my wife swears by Tamiya Clear Red for blood). They also stock some of the accessory sprues, which I picked up an assortment of.

So, here is the first of them - their "Jerry Cans Set", which includes a bunch of barrels and a few buckets as well. You'll notice that they are 1:35 scale, which is too big for 40K, but they are still usable.

Here you see some scale photos which show that these drums should be going up to about someone's waist. How do they look next to a Games Workshop figure?

I reckon that's about coming up to his chest when off the sprue, so they're big barrels, but nothing unrealistic for a far future where everything is bigger.

You get plenty of Jerry Cans and barrels for your money, although I will admit I have not yet worked out what to do with the buckets!

I will admit that the barricade set, consisting as it does of some girders for tank traps and some poles for barbed wire would not have interested me heavily if it wasn't for the sort of pocket change it would cost me to buy the ingredients for modelling them anyway. The real question for me is whether to go for Forge World barbed wire or Secret Weapon razor wire.

Perhaps I should buy one of each and do a comparison blog post?

I also got a packet of sand bags (where a slightly larger scale is no big deal).

And some brick walls, which are at a nice height for 28mm figures.

See how they would be total cover for figures in the correct scale?

Moving on to other suppliers, a handy tip from one of the staff who was a wargamer led me to these 00 scale concrete block walls which are perfectly scaled for 28mm brick walls. There's four walls of these size in the box, but they will need some modelling skill and are one sided, unlike the Tamiya ones.

I also bought about a year's supply of my favoured brand of super glue. I was introduced to this by my wife and now use it almost exclusively (admittedly in part due to her allergy to polystyrene cement fumes, so I end up very dead any time I use it). Do be careful if you move up to this from GW brand super glue - theirs is pretty week on the assumption small children will stick their fingers together with it. My wife has had to drive people to hospital to have parts of their bodies surgically separated due to accidents with this stuff, so don't become someone else's hilarious story at a party!

I also made three larger purchases, the first being this lovely medieval house by Conflix. I can't link to their website, because it seems that they don't have one, but apparently they're a Russian Company, or a front for one, who also make the Pegasus Hobbies line of stuff.

Size wise, it looks OK. You have to stoop to go through the door, but that's pretty typical for old houses. You can see a small bit of one of the roof tiles has broken - the box was pretty squashed, but I grabbed it at a discount anyway. A bit of the aforementioned Zap, and it was as good as new - you can hardly tell it was ever broken!

And this is the other side. This is, obviously, a totally guilt free purchase as it doesn't add anything to my painting backlog!

And here's a tool so if the wife takes her Dremel somewhere for weeks on end, I still have a tool for all my drilling and pinning and clean up!

Look at all those various attachments!

And the final big purchase - an Airfix Afghan Single Story Dwelling. And yes, I know, 1:48 isn't 40K scale either, but lets see how it looks...

Looking OK here... Sure, the door is a bit low and you have to duck to go into it, but that's not unusual.

I'm pretty happy that this is a good ruin for 40K, just needs a spot of paint. I spent some of Sunday washing it as it's resin, and I wasn't sure if it would have mould release on it. But yet again, the painting score is going up, not down! Unlike the Independent Characters Podcast, I don't count buying things as hobby progress...