What 7 things do all East African Slavers Need

I've completed the Foundry Zanzibari slavers

Bad guy with a whip

Really old bronze cannon

Err - a big dinosaur (can't remember who)

3 little dinosaurs (same company i can't remember)

And a gun emplacement - from Barrage

I think that should cover all eventualities when moving slave about the continent

Painting Challenge Prize

My prize for coming second in the painting challenge to the insurmountable Miles was a £60 gift voucher from the lovely people at Barrage Miniatures. A trawl through their website and an order later, and this arrived

A load of their flexible pavement and some cobbled squares. These are really great

And a large gun emplacement in resin.

Top weekend for pressies at the moment

Büssing A5P Heavy Armoured Cars

I won a couple of prizes during the VI Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. The Westfalia one is yet to arrive but the Barrage Miniatures one arrived ages ago, I was a couple of  Bussing A5P Armoured cars for my VBCW collection.
They are huge vehicles that dwarf everything else in the collection

My dice bag has arrived and it's great

Nesting Season

I've had a really lazy weekend, recovering from a major teaching week (teaching76 masters students  remediation of contaminated land all week).
Fought the 2nd Africa campaign battle (see yesterdays post), read a lot of stuff about Salute (lot of people) and built a machine gun nest for VBCW.
As part of my prize from the painting challenge Alf and Clara from Barrage miniatures sent me a couple free extras These were gun ports for concrete fortification. I turned the smaller one into a machine gun nest, the larger one will hold an AT gun once I've bought one.

Side walls made of balsa

"Buttered" with filler to hide the joins and wood

Painted concrete and washed with black ink. Added card roof and foliage, 

Top view (obviously), enough room for 4 extra figs

Front view

Generally a very pleasant weekend. Off to build some river sections now while waiting for Agents of Shield

People Choice Prize

So I won the Peoples Choice Award in the Analogue Hobbies V Painting Challenge for this bit of madness

Yes it's flying carpet wars and no I can't believe it it either. What was a random piece of whimsy seem to really please everyone. Thank you all, maybe I'm not the only lunatic in the world.

So my prize was a 35 euro from Barrage Miniatures (see sidebar), a company I'd not used before. I contacted Alf Barrage and placed an order for an armoured car and some boats. The communications with Alf were great, always trust a man with a Hunter S. Thompson motto on the page. The parcel was despatched the next day and arrived from Spain today. Alf even threw in an extra boat, thank you for that Alf.

The armoured car is a resin Ehrhardt E-V/4 Armoured Car that will look like this when done

but at the moment looks like this

Difficult to tell from an unpainted kit it it looks very promising and will make a cool addition to my VBCW collection.

The best things are the boats, which are really great and were cheap (12 euros each)

I can now launch amphibious operations from 1650 to 1939. In addition to these 3 Alf gave me a free extra boat

Overall I am chuffed with my purchases and the service from Barrage was great.

Right off to get a sou'wester, in the mean time listen to this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5vwQuuO52I