Goliath hand cart (first attempt)

Here's my first attempt at making the hand cart. I think I have the design down but I think I need to use a finer grade of brass wire... what do you guys think.

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to everyone out there in Blogger land.

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pioneer's and Goliath’s

Slowly over the last 6 months I've been working my way through a German pioneer company for Flames of War. As with all my flames armies i look for something different i can do to add a certain spark to the army so when my opponents look at it they go “wow” or “hey that’s  neat”. With tank armies this is often easy – do up some nice stowage and a good paint job and most people are happy.  Unfortunately when it comes to infantry armies most people get wowed by fancy bases and the miniatures themselves are often overlooked in the face of flashy bases with lots of silflor grass tufts and little flowers (don’t get me wrong these things are cool).  As this army is for next years MWGT in Auckland i really wanted to add some character to my army and up until today i didnt have a clue what i could do. At lunchtime i was struck with inspiration – a few months back id been reading up on the German wire controlled bomb: the goliath, and vaguely remembered a small note about pioneers carrying the Goliath around on a hand cart. I thought to myself that might make an interesting infantry stand in my force as the Goliath is meant to be represented in the game on a medium base until it is unleashed upon an unsuspecting enemy tank or bunker.  With this idea in mind i decided to do some more research and found some pictures for reference as to what this hand cart looked like.

It would seam from these pictures that it can be pulled along without too much trouble by a pair of Pioneers and has several different wheel variety's.
Whilst researching the hand cart i also discovered that the Kettenkrad was also often used by pioneers on the eastern front to quickly move a Goliath into position.   However finding a real photo of this seams to be difficult and so far all ive come up with is pictures of a Tamiya kit that is available. If i can find some historical photo’s of a Kettenkrad pulling a Goliath on a trolley then ill maker some of them as well. 
Watch this space for pictures of my first attempt for this model conversion.

Flames of war EW Game

Just had a great game of EW Flames of War with my mate Mark. Mark Took a nice swanky new French tank force (so new, it was shiny metal without guns ) up against my German Czech tank company. 
We played Cauldron – a mission which i know a lot of people don't like. Personally i think its a good mission (although i will admit as the defender it was hard going for me).
Was a fairly bloody game with me losing most of force but only ending up losing one platoon in total.  Mark faired worse as i managed to destroy 3 of his platoons. Unfortunately attrition meant that i didnt have enough tanks left on the table to defend both objectives and Mark managed to take one of the objectives from me in his turn 9 with the game ending in a 4:3. The way i see it if you have to lose a 4:3 is the way to go so I'm not too upset by the loss.  Both of us had up and down luck in the game (i think i need to pray a bit harder to the dice gods because in the first 3 turns of the game i was rolling a truckload of 1’s and 2’s).
Overall great fun and looking forward to our next EW encounter.
- Sorry there are no pics, was too caught up in the game and forgot to take any shots.