1:72 German Volkssturm Defenders (WWII)

The last call-up

In the autumn of 1944 Germany proclaimed a general home guard and called into it men from sixteen to sixty years of age, that is those whom the previous call-ups had passed over. The result was a formation without a uniform dress: a civilian coat or a work tunic, an armband with lettering on the sleeve, a cap or a steel helmet from the First World War on the head. The army put the armament together from anything it found in the depots and among captured stocks, from rifles of several countries, from single-shot antitank weapons and from simplified submachine guns made of pressed sheet metal. It is precisely that incoherence that makes the home guard a rewarding subject for a modeler, because every figure looks different.

Flash on the edges of the molding

Sets of this type tend to have thin films around the edges of the parts, which arose when material flowed into the gap between the halves of the mold. Most of them are usually between an arm and the body, under the stock of a weapon and between the legs, that is exactly where a gap ought to be visible.

What to remove it with

The finest films can be peeled off with a dry pointed tool, while the thicker ones need a fresh edge guided perpendicular to the film and a supported finger so that the knife does not slip. A file cannot be worked in these tight recesses, because it does not reach into them and scrapes off the surrounding relief. The remains can be smoothed with very fine abrasive paper moistened with water.

Finally it pays to go over the moldings against the light. A remnant of film is visible against the light as a dull shadow where there ought to be open space, and this reveals even the places that a view from above does not show.