Chapter seven of my D-day group build project, well the Horsa is finished and looks quite good to me, perhaps not the best work I've turned out but O.K. ,obviously I can't post any pictures of that until the end but I have continued with the dio and expect to have the whole project done and dusted by the end of April and then will do some more work on my on-going B29.
I have done some research about the glider part of operation Overlord where they were used to secure Pegasus bridge to hold up any attempts by the Germans to move forward into the area of the beaches, I found some interesting pictures of the various obstacles used to damage the gliders on landing known as Rommels asparagus, they seemed to be mostly either large wooden stakes driven into the ground and strung together with barbed wire or large, roughly triangular frame works that were intended to destroy the gliders as they landed, made from tree trunks, these are what I have tried to replicate and although the pictures I have found show these on the beaches I see no reason why they wouldn't have been used inland as well.
I intend to show my glider seconds before touching down just missing a couple of obstacles, my first problem was what the base should be, some sort of flat piece of wood with a nice routered edge perhaps ,so I went out and scoured the shops and came across what we in the U.K call a "Lazy susan" , it's basically a cake stand on a base with bearings so that the cake stand can be rotated , at first that was going to be it but it just looked too plain even after I sprayed it satin black so that ended up becoming the base for the base !, next I got a piece of old plasterboard (U.S. = Drywall) and carved it into a rough, random shape which I think looks great against the perfectly circular base, I sealed it with PVA and then made up a small amount of papier mache and created some depth to the surface,once that was dry it was given a coat of Plaster of paris and allowed to dry off for a couple of days before continuing. once all was dry the platerboard base was sprayed all over with a dark grey primer again to provide contrast with the black base, like I said I expect to have it finished by next weekend and will post my final update and some more pictures then.
cheers N.
5 attached images. Click to enlarge.
