May 30, 2018

Westwind Productions
28mm SHS
Seperate Head System
(1)

A closer look at some heads from the SHS range of Westwind Productions. Westwind offers a large selection of heads for the Secrets of the Reich figures they are producing.
SOTR is a Weird World War Two 28mm tabletop game, this link gives you a very good descripton of the game, even when it is only available in German language. The google translation into English is here.

On the left handside you see the contents of SHS-SOTR1 "German gas mask heads" which contains the upper sprue two times and the piece below three times, which makes 20 heads. They are nice modelled and the casting looks almost good if there was not the distinctive casting line and some recess which will need some serious cleanup.

On the right handside you see the contents of SHS-SOTR8 "Soviet gas mask heads in helmets". This package contains also 20 heads, the same sprue five times. The modelling is nice but the heads will need some cleanup as mentioned before.

 
Comparison with some matching heads, the first two heads come from Warlord Games' German infantry, the next three heads come from Westwind (German, German, Soviet), and the last head is taken from a box of Wargames Factory German Infantry which is less heroic scale in contrast of the WLG Germans.

I do not want to rate them, but I think they are fine and will do very well for my special purposes. Compared with the plastic heads, the actual heads are clearly smaller but the helmets are at least equal sized as their plastic companions what makes them fitting well.

I already had some headless Germans, a mix of Warlord Games and Wargames Factory Germans. All I had to do was to drill a hole for the headpin and then I pushed the heads in. Since I have to clean them up, they are not glued.

On the first look at the new heads I was a little sceptical because of their size, I could not imagine that this would look well, but I does look very well and the unified size of the new head will hide the small size differences of the two different manufacturers' figures.

The last figure in the row comes from the old Void tabletop, but I can not say of which faction. They were included in a Void starterbox I got from the bay some years ago and I never knew what's to do with them.
A new head, a MP39 with the matching ammo pouch, and this mini can be used in any www2 game as armoured infantry at least this is what I want to use them for.

I can not wait to see this guys roaming through the streets of Sassnitz, on the search for artifacts, but as you sure may know, so many models, so little time.

 
A Soviet gas mask helmet attached to a Plastic Soldier Company 28mm Soviet infantry man. This will be the next project, along with a matching vehicle for Mariya Oktyabrskaya.
I painted a handfull of Soviets from PSC some time ago, now they are on the workbench again, waiting for new heads. They match perfect, the conversion above was done in two minutes and I think it looks fine.

Even when I thought at the first look that the heads were two small, I think the the heads fit very well. Especially when you use less heroic scaled miniatures like I did with the PCS figure on the picture above.

Since I had a small accident at work, which gave me a mighty bruise on my arm, some things are a litte more complicated at the moment, but as soons as possible some heads will role...

By the way,
I updated the post about the part-selfprinted Sd.Kfz.139 with a small video to documentate the printing process.

No comments: