UBB.threads Forums Uniform & Accessories German Military Uniform Forum Collar Tab help

Greetings!

My first post here and I hope that you'll allow me to benefit from your expertise in this area.

First a quick background to what I need help with. I play the game WWII Online which is a MMO recreating the war in the west aprox 40-42. In this game I'm a member of the squad 116th Panzer Div. "Der Windhund" for whom I do a lot of graphic work ( I design all their awards etc). My latest project is to design all the insignia so that each player can have their rank on their personal (Honor Roll page) (Look at my page, "TeufelX" for an example of insignia and medals). I'm doing this in Photoshop as layers so I can keep the parts and recreate any rank and branch with ease and I'm trying very hard to make it look legit.
I think I've got the Heer/Panzer collar tabs down, but still need the dimensions and angle of tilt for the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine tabs. Also have some related questions I hope your knowledge will help me answer.

OK,now to my questions (this time ).

1. What are the dimensions of the Luftwaffe tabs (+angle of tilt)
2. Same for Kriegsmarine
3. I've seen a lot of piped Heer tabs, when should a tab be piped with waffenfarbe? (any particular time, ranks, branch?)
4. I've seen Litzens backed by tabs in waffenfarbe, when would this be used?

I love doing this research as I'mlearning a lot allong the way and hopefully some day I'll be able to put it to use for my own collection.
Anyway, thanks in advance for all help! (and if anyone is interested in taking aprt in my work I'd be glad to share).

Never mind the Kriegsmarine stuff for now. But I realy need the size of Luftwafef tabs!

I looked in my reference books but couldn't find any mesurements on Luftwaffe tabs. I measured one I have but I might not be correct on the angle as I haven't done this since grade school,30 years ago.
I come up with 42mm accross,56mm high and an angle of 80 degrees.
The tabs with the waffenfarb color behind the litzen is for the Waffenrock tunic.

Thank you very much, I apreaciate the effort. From experimenting with pictures 've gathered it seems there's quite a range of variations with angles between 10-15degrees and varying width (the ones with higher angles beeing wider).

Here's 3 examples of my own construction derived from guestimates I made.

Gefreiter, Flier

Hauptman, Flier

Oberstleutnant, Flier

These was derived by looking at a lot of pictures and using the most common ratios and angles, but as I had no measurements to go by size might be off. I will compare with the numbers you gave me now, thanks!!

(I've been told on anoterh forum that my questions are unanswerable ).

BTW, does the metal birds for the tabs also vary in size? If not how wide are they tip to tip?

TIA
Thomas

Wow, I just checked my tabs and they are only off your measurement by *3* pixels in each direction. I woudl say that's well within acceptable limits for wartime production
Thanks again!

How many waffenfarbe are you going to make the tabs with? Are you going to do the HG units, Flak, Field Divisions, and etc? There are tons and tons of options.

Thomas, nice work on the tabs. They look great.
I measured the ones I have and come up with 30mm for enlised and 21-24mm for officers. I'm sure Paul would know better on the range of measurements as he has studied these more than I have.

quote:

Originally posted by PaulR:
How many waffenfarbe are you going to make the tabs with? Are you going to do the HG units, Flak, Field Divisions, and etc? There are tons and tons of options.

I make them as needed, as each element of the tabs is a separate layer in Photoshop making another branch is as simple as filling the "board" layer with a new color and you're done.
For my squads use we only need flieger ones(How's that for historic accuracy, a Panzer Division formed in '44 taking part in the invasion of France with an integral fighter wind ).

quote:

Originally posted by Raymond:
Thomas, nice work on the tabs. They look great.

Thank you very much, kind words.

quote:

I measured the ones I have and come up with 30mm for enlised and 21-24mm for officers. I'm sure Paul would know better on the range of measurements as he has studied these more than I have.

21-24mm? That's like HALF the sizeof the ones I've made, can the range of variation realy be THAT big??

quote:

Originally posted by PaulR:
How many waffenfarbe are you going to make the tabs with? Are you going to do the HG units, Flak, Field Divisions, and etc? There are tons and tons of options.

I only have Kriegsmarine left to tacklebasically. Think I already had Heer down. Some exaples...

EM Litzens (on tabs)

Stabsgefreiter, sleeve insignia

Panzergrenadier Feldwebel, with slip-on

Luftwaffe Flieger Oberstleutnant, shoulder

TeufelX,

Your feldwebel eppaulette looks beautiful, but the proportions are wrong. It looks way too long and thin. I am attaching a photo of a real one. it is 4.8 x 11.8 cm. Top of piping to end of tresse is 10.8 cm.

Also note the numbering style on the slip on. It is long and thin. The other common style is so called 'chain stitch'.

David!

Thank you for that info, I will put it to good use. Is that the standard "specced" size of shoulder boards?

I know it was out of proportion and it was the first part of this project I did before I got more 'obsessed' with egtting it bang on. My shoulder boards was designed so that they would shrink and become the same proportions as the ribbon medals our squad uses (for all the awards I've designed for them check out this PDF (aprox 1mb). Once done with the collar tabs I might go back and redo all shoulder boards at proper dimensions.
One big propblem though is finding good source materials to work with, although you can find lots of pictures they are rarely high res and more often than not skewed, badly lighted etc. (photographed at angles, have text or water mark and other bad things).
If someone could help me find high res quality images of construction parts I could probably make extreme quality versions for educational and informational purposes (or just for the fun of it ).

Photo,

Sorry for the poor quality. It was a quick and dirty job.

quote:

Originally posted by AussieDave:
I am attaching a photo of a real one. it is 4.8 x 11.8 cm. Top of piping to end of tresse is 18.8 cm.

Do I not have access to attached pictures or did you forget to post it?

Shoulder board size varied a lot, depending on use. Greatcoat ones are longer, field ones are often shorter, but this is about average.

When I have the time, I could do a bunch of photos of the ones I have, if that helps. I can use a camera stand, to help cut down skewing.

I have hundreds of different shoulder and collar tabs, but all are Wehrmacht Heer (army). I don't collect SS, Luftwaffe, Kreigsmarine or other organisations.

David!

Sorry about the delay in posting the photo. I had to drag it out of the display cabinet, find my camera, and stuff around for a while, to get it loaded.

David!

Note - I got one of the dimensions wrong initially. Top of piping to end of tresse was 10.8 not 18.8 cm

Well, I sincerly apreciate your advice and help, this is far cry from the response I've meet on some other forums.
Let me think it over and get a grip on where to start and maybe we could make it a public project. (Right now it's merely for the use of my gaming squad so the need for variation isn't that big. But working with quality sources and making known variations is something that might be of interest to a greater audience?).

Basically what I'd need is clean, prefreably flat and unskewed images of different parts, like plain board, tresse, pips, buttons, larger patches of cloth to be used as patters etc.
It's quite a demanding order and way to much for a single person to contribute.

Just give me a yell. If we started a topic to collect this sort of stuff, I'm sure you would get everything you needed, pretty quickly.

We try to keep it friendly here, especially for the recent arrivals.

David!

Guess I need to set up a new site on my webserver then dedicated to the project, with the collected expertise of the forums it could become quite a good source of reference not only showing the digital insignias but also giving background info etc.
Question though for other readers, would there be interest in such a project?

Sent you some PMs Dave, not sure if you've seen them.
I have begun preparing for a new project.