On the workbench - 39th Guards Motor Rifle Division

I haven't done a lot in the last month or more, due to continued eye trouble.  It now seems I have dry eye syndrome, which means drops and eye ointment indefinitely.  He-hoh!

Anyway, following my success on e-bay a few months back, I thought it was time to get back to some Cold War Commander Soviets.  I'm putting together  the 39th Guards Motor Rifle Division, for operations in the Fulda Gap area of southern Germany in 1985.

On the table at the back are three BTR-60 battalions, each of 11 BTR-60PKs, three companies of three carrying infantry and one company of two carrying support weapons SA-7s, AT-5 Spandrel teams and SPG-9 teams, with two Gaz 66s with 120mm mortars.

In front of this is a battalion of T-62s (as these were in the e-bay purchase) but these will need upgrading to T-72 as 39th was a CAT 1 unit.  In front of these are various engineering assets including a PMP bridge on trucks, two TMM bridges on trucks and other engineering assets.  There are some unpainted engineering vehicles too.  There are also some BRDM-3s, an SA-9 and ZSU23/4 Shilka.

This is a dismounted infantry battalion, rebased as the original e-bay purchase was based for Challenger.

This was my attempt at converting a BTR-60PK into a BTR-TACP FAC vehicle, following Steve Grahams method as laid out in his blog.
http://littleleadarmsrace.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/btr60-tacp-wip.html
Seemed to be a relatively straightforward conversion.  I cut the barrel off with a craft knife.  Cut some card (from an old business card) to shape, bent it to form the platform at the back and super-glued it in place, allowing the glue to soak into the card to stiffen it once set.  Then trimmed some plastic spar to size for the generator and glued that onto the card platform.  I also stuck a small card rectangle over the turret front to simulate a vision port in the turret front.  A quick paint job and "hey presto!"

So, one more infantry battalion to rebase and some engineering assets to finish off and the regiment is ready for the table.

Thanks for looking.