Figures for sale

Finally all projects come to an end or run out of steam. After 15 years I have decided that I have reached the end of the road with my Peninsular Armies. I intend to continue with Europe 1809-14 and I am looking at a new project for the British Army in the deeply unfashionable early years of the Revolutionary wars.

However that leaves me with some armies which are surplus to my requirements. I would rather someone else enjoyed using these figure than put them into my loft, also even if my next move is not to the geriatric home it is unlikely to be to a bigger house. So I intend to sell them. I want to price them so as they move but I would also like to get something back to finance the next army.

I think that a charging exactly double what the casting cost would be a bargain as I flatter myself the painting is at least a good average. That would be £2.o0 for a foot figure and £4.50 for a cavalryman. I will sell them by units and I will reduce the price the more you buy. I shall put this notice up for a week and then start selling them off on ebay by units.

If you look back through the old postings you will get an idea of what my figures look like. If you are interested give me an email at. preececeliajohn@aol.com and I will give you an up to date list and details of what you are interested in.

As a rough guide. I have :

Portuguese cavalry 2 units x 12 figs

Cacadores 3 units x 30 figs

Line 6 x 30 figs

Spanish

Cavalry 10 units x 12 figs

Foot units 21 x 30 figs

4 guns with crews

All figures are mint, Matt varnished and based to Grand Manner conventions in sixes.

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Conversions

Now I remember why I never do them!

It all starts well enough. I find the 1mm drill and dremmel, mark where the holes are to go in the head and the shoulders of the mounted officer. Then the hands of the two foot officers who require new swords. Slowly does it, fine that's the hands drilled and quite neat too. The hole in the torso next; skidding around a bit still not too bad. Finally the head - good, good , almost there.

Of course I have not bothered to wrap the head in anything or put it in clamp. OW! suddenly hot! I let go of the red hot head which swings madly round on the drill before snapping the tiny drill bit in half. OK I have more drills carry on. That is a nice fit now. A bright idea why bother to go to the garage to get some soft metal wire the broken drill bit will make a perfect fitting peg for head and torso.Perfect in it goes, press hard. Oh, wait it has slipped entirely into the torso and is sitting there just below the level of the body. Now the swearing starts. Too flush to get out with pliers; it is a perfect fit and cannot be levered out or hammered further in.

Ten minutes of fumbling then OK if it won't come out then I will have to drill holes on each side of it into the soft metal then force a needle pliers in and pull it out. It will ruin the neckline of the figure and need rebuilding with green stuff but that's the best option.I start drilling and drilling and drilling. The wife arrives: "are you using power tools in the bedroom? I thought we agreed you wouldn't do that anymore?"

Finally out comes the rod. Still the up side is that I now have plenty of room to move the head around. In fact I could put a couple more heads in if I wanted to. Glue it up scoop in the araldite and stand back.

Actually that doesn't look too bad at all. Time for a coffee. I don't know why I don't convert more of my figures.

simplicity

I was painting some English Civil War figures a week or so ago. They had lain unpainted in my box for some years. I can remember when I bought them being really impressed with them.
"Look at the detail on these" I enthused, " Look, Wow! this ones got a cheese sandwich in his pocket!"

I must confess to being less impressed when I came to paint them, and in fact they have gone back in the box half finished. I had done the clothing, equipment boots weapons and still had masses left to do. Frankly enthusiasm just ran out.

I contrast I was reading 'Flashman at the Charge' again last week when I suddenly felt the need for a fictitious 19C German unit. I had some old plastic ACW cavalry to hand and in a spirit of nostalgia got a scalpel and started carving at the hats. Two evenings later I had a unit of eight cavalry and I had really enjoyed myself in the process. To be honest I am not sure what the moral of this story is, I leave you to draw any conclusions you may wish.

May I recommend..

The Blasthofblog. This is a joint venture by four enthusiasts to celebrate the Wargames Classic, Charge.

http://blasthofblog.blogspot.com/

I have the great privilege to be collaborating with Steve Gill, Phil Olley and Stuart Asquith to produce a blog that will honour this great book. We hope to share, however faintly reflected, the magic that we have enjoyed.

I may add that it will have the bonus that since all posts will have at least some relevance to the book readers will be spared my opinionated rantings.

Please do visit and if you can leave a comment about your own experience of Charge it will be greatly appreciated.

Its been a long time coming

That's both this post and it's subject. But first off a thank you to all those who responded to my rather lazy invitation to write this blog for me. As always some really thought provoking comments that I will return to in time.

I was quietly sticking bits of lorry together when a lot came up on ebay. Stadden Pavlovski Guard Grenadiers 33 figures! Like all of you when I first bought Charge! for the very expensive sum of 3 Guineas, I drooled over the pictures and loved the light infantry. I am sure we all vowed to have a unit ourselves one day. The seller certainly had because the figures were organised exactly right for Charge.


A few clicks later the figures were mine for the very low price of £6. Of course at that price I am happy with a few blemishes and a few bayonets missing and a slight amount of lead rot are tolerable. So straight off into a bleach soak to stabilise the oxidisation, this also turns it brown so that it can easily be removed with brass wire brush. At the same time I decided to remove all of the bayonets rather than replace a missing few. My excuse is that they are skirmishers and it gives them a reason to Carry the sabre moulded at their side.
With the knife in my hand I got carried away. The officers had all Napoleonic bits such as epaulets removed and while I was at it I sawed away the packs that they were carrying. I quite understand that an officer may wish to have a warm cloak and a cold chicken and bottle of champagne to hand, but in my armies a Gentleman will have a manservant to carry such things. The sword went at the same time, a pin will be required here.


The unit has a mounted officer in the book. Interestingly Stadden never made one so a search brought out a George Washington figure that would do the job. A head donor was selected and the saw was back in action. I do wonder if I could have brought myself to hack away if these had cost £1.20 a figure rather than 20p.
Almost finished and yet... After being involved in the 'WarGamers' refight of Sitangbad I realise that their is always a degree of tension involved when copying these classic units. Does one slavishly copy or adapt as it goes along? In this case I thought I would change the figures a little to personalise them for myself. I was unsure about the tall brass fronted mitre for Light infantry. I think I prefer the idea of a cloth mitre. I have always liked the way that it is illustrated by contemporaries as curved to the front like a 'Noddy' hat. So out with the pliers and file and I change Charles Stadden's perfect rendition of a grenadiers mitre into something much more sloppy.

Since I am having the temerity to meddle with the masters work, I decide to add pigtails. I do like all my 18C to have powder and queues. This is a job for greenstuff. I hate Greenstuff it sticks to everything but the figure and works like a blob of chewing gum. Still I do one, perhaps tomorrow I will go and get some epoxy putty.



Time to start thinking about what colour to paint them. Like an archaeologist studying tomb paintings I start to pore over the illustrations to Charge. And that is where things get interesting. But I will leave that for my next post...

What are the best rules that you never use?

A quiet month so far, at least as far as wargaming and blogging. I began by having my gall bladder removed (don't worry I am not about to post any pictures). I have not done much since although this week I am starting to catch up on a little light basing. Sticking machine gun crews into tile cement, that sort of thing, nothing too strenuous.

So I thought I would pose a puzzle for my readers. We all have a bundle of rules that we never use. Now I am not asking what you don't like. That would be far too obvious and banal for the razor sharp intellects that gather here. No, what rules do you really like and admire but never, ever actually get around to using and,of course, why is that?

I can start the ball rolling with three sets.


Firstly the WRG set Corps de Armee, remember the blue covered one with an introduction by David Chandler. I poured over these for months studying them and thinking they were everything we could ever need. They were hugely influential on my thinking but I never did get round to playing them and I suspect now that they may well have been unplayable.

The second set is Howard Whitehouses 'Science v Pluck or too much for the Mahdi'. I have both editions and everything about this set screams FUN! I love to read it but never seem to have had the occasion to play it. I suspect the reason is that I play few games nowadays and when I do a more traditional game seems to be demanded by the occasion.

The last rule set I have chosen will no doubt cause some raised eyebrows but have to confess to having never played a game using Charles Grant's 'The Wargame'. Poured over it, loved the book but never played it. Wonderful rules but I have always used Charge by Lawford and Young. This may be because Charge was the second Wargaming book I ever bought, in 1969, but thirty years passed before I finally found a second hand copy of Charles Grant's book. As you can imagine I had become somewhat set in my ways by that time.

Well, as they say Coffee break over. Time to get back to spreading grouting on pennies, surely one of the most boring activities ever devised.

A bit of ephemera

I have always been very bad at adding the finishing touches to my army. I suppose because I enjoy painting but any attempt at even the most basic modelling ends in a welter of glued fingers crumpled paper and swearing. I have over 5000 Napoleonics but very few of them carry flags yet and I have no command stands.
So having hit this months target for painting, (100 Olley points or 200 20m figures) I decided to use the dog days of the month to do a bit of basing and such.

I had started to convert an old petrol tanker from a cheap metal source. You will all have seen these, a metal lorry with snap on plastic superstructure. May have been originally matchbox but most of them were given away with petrol and I picked up a boxful from a dealer for £1 each. I had decided that I wanted a militia lorry calling up support. Maybe getting workers to defend the barricades or maybe a day trip out from Madrid to the front line. I had a BB miniatures film crew, the cameraman and sound operator were fine for international news but the director was a bit pointless unless I wanted a Soviet film crew, which I don't. So into the back of the truck. I also bought at the same time from BB Heroines of the revolution pack. I was a bit disappointed, having admitted my fantasy senoritas, these looked more like Les Dawson in drag. Most were given away but a couple went into the lorry. Along with a couple of left over Irregulars these were the passengers. I would have liked more but was to mean to take any more from proper units.

The dog and boy chasing along behind were added and then it was painted and based. Photographs gave plenty of examples of commandeered militia vehicles. Basing was a problem, I was tempted to put the whole thing on a sheet of cobblestones but in the end decided to put it on a dusty road as being the most versatile. The groundwork is tiling grout and is that horrible brown colour. Useful for earth but who would want it in their bathroom?

I am playing around with bases at the moment being by nature a contrary old bastard I have decided to dislike the modern fashion for super detailed grit with with a few tufts of state of the art grass on it. I am playing around with minimalist bases. In fact the colour is less intense and much more dusty looking in real life. The flash has saturated the colour image. They are in fact not wading around in a sea of pink dust complete with wave crests. It just looks like that.

I should have taken the pictures outdoors but what are the chances of that on an English Bank Holiday?

And yes the lorry does have a serious use on the table top. I have a coup game planned where seizing vital points in the city releases reinforcements. The lorry will add a number of volunteers each move it drives around the streets.