Some of the many minis and general plastic / resin stuff that comes off the printer are 28mm (ish) scale WW2 miniatures.

The aim behind these was to play bolt action or chain of command inspired in this case by stumbling upon the Little Wars TV YouTube channel. In particular this video (link) they did for the famous scene in the TV series Band of Brothers with the Americans trying to take the cross road from a dug in German force.

What then started was a trawl of the internet, YouTube and book suggestions (currently the above) from friends around the various campaigns during the war.

I settled on the Africa campaign, in part because it appears to be a less played / painted part of the war (which helps greatly as someone who over compares to the perfect painting of anyone online!) and in part because looking over my small paint collection the variants of white / beige / brown paints far out weighed the greens!

The last most had more in-work and complete photos of the Matilda and Cromwell Cruiser having only just come to a built/painted state. The Cromwell being a Warlord kit and the Matilda being the second tank I successfully (after many Tiger based failures) got off the FDM printer some 2 years ago now.

The First tank to make its way successfully (ok, the barrel is a little worse for wear) was a Stuart M3 ‘Honey’. The surface finish on this is quite rough as it was very early on in my printing journey and the settings were at that time far from dialled in! Instead of straight sand paint and weathering as the two above this got a slight ‘camo’ pattern that helped to hide some of the more egregious print flaws by breaking up flat areas.

The starting point for the journey though printing minis in resin were some of the commonwealth miniatures from RKX Miniatures Britain & Commonwealth collection. They came with various support weapons as well as the bulk infantry and vehicles. Above is the British 6 PDR with slots in the base for various gunners / loaders all parked behind a printed sandbag wall.

Slightly further down the scale are the Piat, 2″ light mortar team and Vickers HMG team. These again are on a FDM printed bases, with the Commando ran Vickers again having inserts for the ‘crew’ where appropriate, though for some of them the count of crew with the 3D sculpts for these 2 exceeds that  is required by Bolt Action.

The mortar and Piat team come as a pair of individually based minis each, in respective huddled and full sprint poses!

Finally we move into what is the bulk of units needed for most games rank and file infantry. There’s a mixture of equipment across them as I liked the variation before reading that almost all rule sets expect a common rifle loadout across squads with the occasional ‘special’ weapon scattered through.

The Rifles were some of the last minis printed of all of the Rats and as such has a significant backlog of only based minis currently, with only 4 at a complete painted state! This is mainly in part because everything else is more interesting and therefore got printed and painted first, it was only on reading the rules for most 28mm scale games that I found a bulk of infantry with basic arms was needed almost universally!

So those special options are a mixture of Bren guns formed of a gunner and loader, snipers, and radio command squads. In the easiest game of spot the odd one out you can identify some of the first WW2 minis printed and painted before I had decided to move from a western Europe theatre scheme to a Northern Africa one!

Again the Bren gun teams are in an array of states of completed though at a slightly better ratio than the rifles, so that counts for something right?

This Post became a bit of a model dump, in part because there are a few years between starting this and starting printing and painting! There are probably two maybe 3 more posts of ‘catch-up’ looking at minis that have been done before today and then I plan to move to shorter more ‘live’ update post about the general wargaming / printing / painting.