Cardboard Buildings Repair

Around five or so years ago I picked up a Pireme Publishing Waterloo kit for around $10. I hastily made it without really thinking about its sturdiness and longevity. The completed item below in around 2011/2012.

5 years (ish) later I found them in the garage a few weeks ago in all sorts of states. Over time and poor storage they had warped and been damaged. So, as I am quite fond of them I started to repair them, firstly adding coffee stirrers in an attempt to strengthen them and also iron out the kinks. A good dose of glue gun and PVA also helped.

Le Belle Alliance  (below) was the first patient. What a world of difference the first few braces made and the piece is looking far better than it did, it also feels a lot sturdier.

So , onwards I continues bracing all the other kits as well as starting on Hougonmont kit that I had never touched.

 

I am currently basing them so I hope to have some completed pictures soon.

Happy New year !

Corgi Trucks

Hi,

During Archduke Piccilo and I's recent foray into Operation scale WWII games I needed to dramatically increase my logistics units for the Romanians.  As part of my Early War Desert Italian forces I was quite short on trucks so I went for the cheap version and simply press ganged several toy trucks into the fold.

Here in NZ, the Corgi Cadbury toy trucks are everywhere . I can usually pick up three for $5 so I managed to by around 12 of them about a  year ago. They are not 1/72, slightly larger but I don't mind as they are close enough.

A simply spray paint, wash and dry brush has provided me with a emergency backup if I need a lot of trucks at once.  Two of the eight are below:

After watching a terrain tutor youtube clip, I also thought I would experiment with basing vehicles but by using some old foamboard I had. I did not have 3mm board but thought I would try it anyway and am quite pleased with the results of my simple efforts.

I will add a final highlight to the trucks ( to tidy up a lot of the bad dry brushing) and some Italian unit markings but on the whole I am happy with the results.

Merry Christmas to you all !

Scratchbuilt Fantasy Building

I am currently in the process of repairing my 15mm Hougonmont and Le Haye Sainte which are Pireme Publishing card stock buildings. That shall be another post but it did spark my desire to complete several other projects that have long been on the back burner.


Marksman Gaming posted a tutorial some time ago on how he makes his Tudor Cottages. Seeing as I had nothing to do and wanted to practice\learn myself I decided to give one try. One small project I  have is to build some fantasy\medieval town buildings and my Zvedza fortress, as such I need buildings.

 The only building I have made before is the effort below some 10 years ago, not the prettiest thing I might add. Horrible actually but  I guess by 2037 I should be able to make something half decent.

The frames cut out per the recommendation.

Hey Presto - glue gun action, coffee stirrers. matchsticks and PVA glue later the frame is completed.

 I could knock this together in an evening so I was quite pleased with myself. I do want to make some more and all I had left was to paint it and see what it looked like in the light of day. A few glaring errors and improvements needed (Not sure why I used matchsticks) but cheap, recycled and easy to make. They will suit the purpose I want them for so that is good enough for me !

Of course I did try some other things too such as a 1/72 siege tower. I just needed something and this was better than anything else I had.

Italeri\Esci French Legere and Grenadiers.

So the project to rebuild the Army of Portugal continues !

Below are Esci French infantry painted as Legere (The bases need to be tidied as I have made a few mistakes as per usual).

These two stands are Brigade Solignac and Brigade Montmorand.

Esci Old Guard painted as the combined Grenadiers of Brigade Kellerman. I did these as I have 100 Old Guard Figures that I need to use up, so these will also be made into various Spanish\German units that I will need at some point.

Archduke and I also played an initial game of Operation Uranus , which he has posted about on his blog.

I was in Australia last week where it was hot, on return it was also hot in NZ so I have not painted anything. I find hot evenings not that enjoyable for painting so I tend to do basing and such as at least PVA glue dries very quickly. I shall post about my endeavors at a future time.......

Italeri French for Vimiero

Another side project I have is to re-fight the peninsular war battles solo when I can using Sam Mustafa's Grande Armee rule set. As I have a large quantity of 1/72 Napoleonic figures floating around I decided to use them for this. So far the Army of Portugal is almost complete so I shall make a series of blog posts showing them off.

These were painted in large groups, not really that detailed or accurate and I also played around with some flowers\shrubs I was given.

Below, are some of Kellerman's cavalry

A brigade of Chasseurs (Italeri). Is this the only Chasseur set on the market ?

  The Dragoon Brigade  (Italeri)

So yet another side project !. The last few months have been taken up with sorting out Romanians for Operation Uranus, however now they are complete I am working on the following at my leisure :

• 1/72 Napoleonic Armies (above)
• 15mm Sci Fi (For solo skirmish)
• 28mm Sci Fi (For solo skirmish)
• 1/72 Fantasy armies. (Orcs, Rats, undead, humans, dwarves, Elves and Conan the Barbarian.
• A 1/72 medieval fortress and town.
• Siege Equipment. 
• 1/72 Modern. 

I shall make posts on these in turn...

WW1 Action

The moons have aligned ! School holidays , working late and cancelled events meant that I was able to visit David's to join his ww1 action.  Cambria 1917 I think with massed tanks attacking german trenches .

 I was the RAF and had the pleasure of simply flying where I pleased bombing and strafing. Biggles and Snoopy menaced the German positions at first but Snoopy was shot down so Biggles lost his nerve. We paused at the event below as the tanks made it through the wire and onto he trenches

I hope to make the next evening to see the end of it.

A very slow month for me due to a busy life, work and other interests that do not leave much motivation or time to partake in  painting or modelling. I did have a spurt of activity that I do need to finish off that I will leave for a subsequent blog post. Ideally in one month after a conference and busy work time I can finally get back into painting again.

Though, I have managed to visit Archduke Piccolo's for a few chinwag sessions and last night we played a few games of Memoir44 to wet my appetite. Archduke picked up the main rules at the swap meet and I picked up the Eastern Front expansion pack last week so it was time to have a game (Archduke has played solo).

The first scenario we tried was Hill 307 I recall. I played the Axis and Archduke the Allies and the game was a bit of a blood bath but my German troops did manage to puncture the US lines and seize the objective.  US Air power was not enough to save the position but did a lot of damage on the Panzers.

The next game was the "Gates of Berlin" with Archduke as the Soviets and myself as the Axis Panzer Army.

It was a hard fought and bloody contest. Soviet artillery poured fire onto tanks and I took heavy losses though finally forcing the central Soviet line to fail. A quick Panzer thrust captured the bridge and ended the game thought the Germans were in no state to hold the position or keep fighting.

Below - Panzer Casualties mount as we get close to the soviet lines.

Very entertaining evening of games, tea and coconut slice. Just the little spark needed to prompt me to get the Romanians sorted.

Cheers

General d' Armee playtest

Hi,

Chassuer was hosting Archduke Piccolo for a test game of the new ruleset and he invited me along. I arrived an hour or so into the game and then took command of the French. The wonderful collection and terrain are all Marks and they were a joy to play with.

Below are some sample pictures from the game:

 The Austrians surge forwards

 Upon the Guard Cavalry arriving on the field I then had my usual rush of blood to the head and sent the entire cavalry straight up the guts.

Commanding Cavalry is rather fun when you have lots of them !

The Austrian attack stalled several times but then surged forwards giving the Polish infantry a hiding. At this time the French suffered a daze and could not seem to do anything so I took the risk of investing my command dice 100% into the Cavalry to try to make a difference.

It was a good long game though I found it tiring (I only arrived back home at 1am from Australia that morning) but I felt it went well. The rules were easy to pick up and luckily lacked half the modifiers that the GdB ruleset had that caused me a nightmare at Waterloo.

Old Crow Drop Ship

I am in Australia on holiday and its all very good, so here is  a pic anyway of my favorite 15mm vehicle as I need to host the photos somewhere.

NQM PLay Testing

Archduke Piccilo and I sat down last night to try out the NQM rules so we could make sense of it all.

Some pics from those tests. Dug-in Romanians take on the Soviet Hordes. In these tests the Romanians were always wiped out but they often took a lot of Russians with them.

Note Quite Mechanized Romanians

I am currently firing out stands for the 3rd Romanian Army I plan to use at some point.

The above are infantry, AT gunners, Engineers, Command, Gun Crew, mortars and MMG's.

Archduke and I had a working bee to get it all started and we shall try the rules out at some stage with a very simple scenario. What better reason to burn through the hours getting these chaps ready.

They consist of:

• HAT Romanians (perfect)
• A HAT\Armourfast motorcycle for recce.
• Esci French (Had nothing else to do with them)
• Italeri Russians in Winter Uniform (Apart from the helmets they look fine)
• An Airfix French Legionnaire - This figure looks like a soldier with a fur hat.
• An Esci Boer war soldier - He is kneeling and the helmet looks Romanian.
• Airfix WW1 guns
• 1st Armoured shall be some Renault's and a PzIII.
• Not pictured are the ACW and Napoleonic Limbers I will use for the guns

So not accurate for the rivet counters but I make do I with what I have.

Its also getting me back into the swing of things. Archduke and I were supposed to have another bee a few nights ago but as its winter  we have the usual colds running around which delay things.

It turns out that I may have had my first wargame in one year on Saturday. I am sure that I have had more, but in fact I have only had one game. What a depressing thought ! I suspect while I have talked about war-gaming this may not have been the case but this has been one of the reasons for my recent change in focus in the last few weeks.

Geoff kindly organized a 15mm game at his house and I took part on the British side (Fighting my own figures no less). The French\Prussians (Geoff and Andrew) held a ridge-line with a steep escarpment which we (Ross and myself) had to somehow assault.

With my typical dash and bravado off I surged forward however it was not until later I realized that I made a very serious error, perhaps one of the most basic. While the escarpment could be handled I negated, in my enthusiasm I suspect, to check what the right ring of the British Army was doing. While I raced forward in column to assault the hills, I did not notice the right wing was advancing in line and also had a river to cross. This can be seen in the below showing my forces racing ahead.

 This left a conundrum as I had advanced too rapidly but needed to tie down the flank while waiting for the other wing to close up. However, up the hill we went but alas, my dice rolling was not that great and while I did knock around the French to a small degree I simply took a pasting. By then the right wing had descended but was easily repulsed.

A good game though and nice to be back in action. I suspect I shall sell my Prussians (and 28mm Russians) as they simply are an odd fit to the forces I have (Peninsular).

While I was there Andrew showed me his laser cut and hand crafted fleet for Lepanto. Seriously brilliant modelling and painting, these ships were magnificent and photos do not do them justice.

Painted and Based

At a snails pace I am progressing through these plastic figures and I have enough now for some skirmish games.

The above are a mix of Romans, Britons, Knights, Huns and Saracens and once I finish some more I shall have some little games to keep my self entertained.



Apart from that I am getting rid of a lot of stuff  (6mm, 15mm) as sanity has prevailed !

1/72 progresses

As my foray into the Roman world continues I decided a trip to the Fortress of Knowledge was in order. While the box art on the Romans is good, I have no idea what other troop types should look like so I managed to find this, which is very good for a beginner such as myself.

As per usual, I also left with several science pieces and astrophysics for a little light reading.

The next question will be rules, as these figures are all for skirmish type games finding a good set (out of the sets I have) is the next task.

1/72 Ancients and new books

Motivation has been low recently, and I have even contemplated getting rid of most of the things I have apart from a few genres (I have started this process already)

I was in Sydney and managed to visit Hobbyrama where I found some kits that I picked up.

There are are few boxes of Emhar Viking Warriors

A box of Zvedza Turkish Cavalry

And I also took advantage of the Acorn model sales to pick up 4 boxes of:

These will be part of my 1/72 Skirmish\battle system based on some beer and pretzel type rules.  The Imperial Romans don't fit in that well period wise but Ive always wanted a 1/72 Roman army.

Archduke Piccillo kindly gave me some Mongols which are fitting in quite nicely.

As it was my birthday last week (Which I spent ill in bed) my present from the family was a copy of Tony Bath's "Ancient War-gaming" which is a good book but also includes "Setting Up a Wargames Campaigns" which I already have

And Lionel Tarrs Modern (1939-1945) Wargaming Rules

Colorado and purchases

Here I am at the foot of the Rockies for work. I've been in the USA almost a week now and have my final few days in Grand Junction. Its a great town with stunning scenery all around it, nice crisp winter days and successful work days with excellent clients.

It also has a wonderful second hand bookshop, where I picked up the following bargains. A West Point collection of WW2 European battle maps and an excellent ACW piece on several campaigns. I could have easily purchased several more but the suitcase is starting to feel the weight of things.

LAX in a days time and then one final shopping spree at a nice little store I have found.

Painting Space Marines for Fun and Practice.

Over the last 20 years I have picked up a few Spare marine figures as I simply liked them and wanted to paint them. I recall I have about 20 of these so I decided recently to paint one figure each for the Chapters (Regiments I guess) I liked to look of. This was also a practice session on getting back into painting larger figures as recently I have only been painted small or slender figures but trying some of these GW you-tube tutorials at the same time to see techniques I could try on historic figures as well as try some better Red, yellow, blue and gold layers.

So I pulled a few out and decided to paint a Dark Angel (green), Space Wolf (Blue grey) an Ultramarine (Blue), A Crimson Fist (Yellow), A Salamander (Light green), a Blood Angel (Red) and finally a Space Wolf terminator. (The big thing). They are not finished but as its been hot and I have not been painting I played with the camera anyway.

The Space Wolf marine with hand painted shoulder pads. Looks like straight lines are not my forte !

 Though on the other shoulder pad I did hand paint a wolfs head which is practice for a greater project of hand painting my own Historical Standards instead of printing them off from Warflag.(I am slowly getting better at yellow shades though on close up I am not so sure.). When I was a teen everything was manually done so I want to head back in that direction.

 

The Blood Angel where I used several types of Red paints  and some gold layers.

The UltraMarine - trying out some new blues and different Gold techniques.

 Another hand painted shoulder pad insignia.

 The Terminator so far.

 I was in the mood to do these as they have been around far too long, but it was good fun getting the lighter colours out and trying some different things.

I am off to the States in two days for a week. It shall be interesting to be in winter again !