Bodged Barn Door

 Courtesy of Tims 'slightly used military equipment' Emporium I became the proud owner of this Pak 43. The Pak 43 was the final development of the 88mm gun into a dedicated anti-tank weapon, and its carriage and mount were so enormous, it was christened the 'Barn Door'. 

Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of it in its original state, it was still in dark grey undercoat and with a somewhat longer barrel. I gather that originally it was a scratch build and supposed to be 1/76th scale but measuring it up it seemed more like 1/87th - probably the result of whatever was used for the donor gun.

It needed a little bit of light fettling. One of the feet had gone missing and I made a replacement, but the main thing was that the barrel was too long and it had an enormous oversized muzzle brake. I cut the barrel down to 1/100th scale and replaced the muzzle brake with one salvaged from a spare 105mm StuH barrel.

As it is a fairly large gun I tried to use fairly large gunner figures, I had a couple of spare Forged in Battle gunners who are rather 'heroic' in size and I added a spare PSC Russian gunner with his hands over his ears. Painted grey he looked fine alongside the other two. 

It is actually very hard to find photos of the gun in action on the cruciform mount with the shield (there are plenty of the alternate K18 mount with no shield) , but I found a couple of 88mm L71 Waffentrager photos with gun shields and the crew look about the right size.

I just painted it in standard late war three colour camo as that was the most common scheme. I used Desert Ochre as the base this time instead of Desert Sand I  think it looks more like some shades of Dunkelgelb. I didn't bother with a wash but I did give it a drybrush to pick out the highlights. Mercifully the cruciform mount is at roughly 45 degrees to the gun so although it needed a big base, it didn't need a ginormous base.

I real life the towed 88L71 wasn't very successful as it was so heavy to move, and many were simply abandoned on the battlefield after firing a few rounds. Hence the rush to get them onto SP mounts, Nashorns, Jagdpanthers etc. I'm struggling to imagine how it will get used, but I do have one scenario which features them as surprisingly 21st Panzer Div had a whole battalion of these, deployed northwest of Caen on D-Day.