Another 15mm Building for the ECW

While the scenery paint tins are handy and I still have some enthusiasm, I knocked off another building last night. I rather like it, I have to say. As to what it is? - well it certainly isn't a town gate in the sense of being a controlled opening in the enceinte which can be locked and defended, and which could withstand the efforts of a hostile army with serious equipment, but it is a point within a town which could have a sentry, and (I suppose) be barricaded if necessary, and which announces that you are now leaving such-and-such a place, and entering such-and-such other place, and, by the way, it is twenty-five past two.

I have no idea what the casting is - it is very heavy resin, and I bought it secondhand a while ago - I had thought it was JR Miniatures, but it isn't, and it isn't Eureka/SHQ either - no idea - I suspect it's quite old. Anyone recognise this? Good quality, anyway - one of my better eBay efforts. While I was painting this, some passing thoughts cropped up, viz:

(1) whatever this is an entrance to, it would make sense if the door to the actual building, and therefore the clock, were on the inside - no point telling outsiders what time it is, unless we wish to impress...

(2) Hmmm - the clock. I am not exactly sure whether this clock would have been in this form in 1640 - my guess is that it is OK - I saw a lot of very old public clocks in Germany and Austria recently which predate this, but am not sure if the appearance of this clock is an anachronism (how ironic would that be?), and therefore I do not propose to investigate the matter too carefully in case I get the wrong answer [I can't hear you - lalalalalalalala etc] 

(3) The clock (continued) - to be on the safe side, I picked out the details in an understated manner by drybrushing with a pewter colour - that way the clock does not hit you in the face, and reduces the chance of some smart-ass on TMP noticing that, like Einstein's famous clock seen from the Bern tramcar, it is a time-travelling clock. However, I seem to have understated it to the point of invisibility, so I may revisit it with something a little brighter. I'll think about it.

This now joins the queue for varnish. My latest thoughts on this matter are that the idea of fiddling round with a pile of aerosols is highly unappealing - apart from the toxic hazard and the collateral damage, there is more than a slight chance that I, being a Klutz, would not achieve a decent coverage anyway. Thanks to very useful input in response to previous post (for which, again, thanks), I am now obsessed with the idea that my new paintwork is just waiting to leap off again at the first excuse, and at the first contact with tissue paper, so it is a no-brainer to get on with the varnishing job. In fact, I shall also set up a cottage industry for a few days to catch up with the backlog of other buildings which I never quite got around to varnishing. I'm quite looking forward to a few moronic evenings of brushing varnish onto walls and buildings, and I'm looking online for a decent-sized can of artists'-quality acrylic matt varnish to do the job. I may even consider varnishing some of the Lilliput Lane and David Winter stuff - that would be seen as sacrilege by true collectors, but these items are heavy and have very delicate paintwork, so it might be an idea.  

It is, it goes without saying, essential that this varnish should be fully matt. If my buildings end up even the tiniest bit shiny then I shall be forced to run, screaming, around the country. It will be on TV - people will know when I'm passing their way, and will turn out to watch me. It will be the tantrum to end all tantra.

Next up is the mighty star-fort. I shall be especially careful to make sure this is a reasonable colour-match with the existing Vauban bits, though I do not intend to flock it. There will be more about this soon, I think.

Passing mention of Lilliput Lane reminds me that, if I propose to have a bash at something like the Great Leaguer of Chester, for example, then some representation of a section of something like a proper town would be a good idea. A row of cutesy LL cottages doesn't really fit the bill, quite apart from the nausea factor. I'm not sure what (if anything) I am going to do about this - my scratchbuilding days were long ago, I think - certainly on any kind of industrial scale. While I was looking about for ideas, I found that Tey Potteries (now defunct, but once of Norfolk) did a section of the Chester Rows as part of their range, though it is very rare and thus expensive. It did, however, introduce me to the idea of Tey houses - their Britain in Miniature range includes some nice pieces, and they are available cheaply on eBay if you look around.

I'll include some pictures of Tey stuff, to give the idea. I'm not really thinking terribly seriously about this, but (as ever) here are some thoughts on the subject:

This is the Chester Rows piece - probably too small and too
Victorian, and this particular example is in the USA, but
amusing. All pics very kindly supplied by eBay. 

(1) I have absolutely no idea what scale these are - they are probably a mixture, like all such ranges, but sizes I've seen given in eBay listings suggest that they tend to be about 7 or 8cm high, which might make some of the pieces around 10mm scale, which is getting a bit small but might be OK.

(2) The stylised appearance of these is obviously something of an acquired taste - they are not in any sense realistic, and would not mix at all comfortably with other makes. Some of them are charming, though, in a wacky sort of way - the idea of playing with toy soldiers with a backdrop of blatant toy houses is not unpleasant. A small group of these would make a nice town, and most of the models seem to be gratifyingly rectangular.

(3) Being pottery ornaments, they are obviously offensively shiny, and a good coat of the aforementioned artists' varnish would be needed to calm them down. Again, serious collectors would be horrified, but they are not valuable, and they would mine anyway (heh heh) if I bought some.

(4) You know what? - I think I probably won't do anything about this range, but it was interesting looking at them, and it's useful to come up with something unfamiliar now and then. So there you have it, gentlemen - Tey Pottery.

What a Load of Old Walls

Further to references in a couple of recent posts, I have now painted up most of my new Battleground medieval fortifications. The paint now appears to be sticking nicely - thanks for assistance with the base coat issue - I am still swithering over whether to apply a coat of matt varnish spray to finish. I prefer the appearance without, but these chaps will have to be stored away in a box, wrapped in tissue, and tough might be better than pretty - thinking about it.

Quick photo includes my existing Battleground pieces, just to fatten up the picture a bit. I decided to go for a general stone shade, which, strictly speaking, is incorrect for the Siege of Chester (Chester has good, red Bunter sandstone walls), but is fine for Newcastle and a pile of other places. Also, a big plus for this colour is that it will match well with my Vauban pieces, so I can produce hybrid fortified towns for the Peninsular War.

I still have to paint a rather natty little gatehouse (with clock) and two dirty great half star-fort castings (two halves = one complete star-fort). The star-forts may be a week or so, but I'll try to get the gatehouse done at the weekend. The gatehouse is not Battleground, by the way - I think it's JR Miniatures, but I'm not sure.

Drybrushing stonework, fortified with plenty of coffee and my new Radu Lupu recording of the Brahms Divertimenti, has been very therapeutic!

Reluctant Paint

Here you see me having a relaxing evening session, preparing my
15mm fortifications for painting

Hmmm. Interesting.

I took advantage of an odd free evening to make a start on my medieval wall castings, safely received from the maker last week. I've done a fair amount of this sort of thing before, and I find it an enjoyable job - especially on something like stone walls, which have relatively few colours and produce a pleasing result very quickly. The new castings, as ever, are resin, and - as ever - I've taken care to scrub them down thoroughly with very hot water and washing-up detergent, then rinsed them very carefully in clean water and left them to dry off completely. I know that some of the release agents used with resin castings are petroleum based - once, long ago, I made a resin chess set using silicone rubber moulds, and made up my own release agent by dissolving Vaseline in white spirit. So the keywords are greasy, waxy, and the response is hot water and detergent and a good scrub.

Never had problems, really. Sometimes the first coat of paint doesn't cover too well, but a second undercoat covers the gaps nicely, and then everything goes to plan. This shipment seem to have traces of something a bit more stubborn. The first coat of the old Dulux Rum Caramel #2 (household wall emulsion) has rolled back a bit to leave some white spots and streaks showing. In other words, the paint has covered about 98%, maybe more, but there are gaps.

I'm not unduly worried - I usually use two coats of the base colour, and I think the second layer of undercoat should fix it, but this is the worst experience of non-sticking paint I've had, so I stopped about 20% of the way through the shipment just to be on the safe side. If I'm not happy with progress on the second coat on the ones I've started, I'll consider some more serious cleaning and preparation of the remaining castings, but I'm a bit surprised, really, and I'd rather not have to. I don't think I've skimped on the scrubbing-up. I've read before about guys who prepare their castings in the dishwasher, but I fear that dishwasher products might deposit something undesirable on the castings anyway, and some of the battlements and fiddly bits look a bit fragile for a dishwasher - I've already had to glue a couple of parts which I de-flashed with too much enthusiasm.

Anyone got any suggestions? I have various additive things in the drawer like acrylic flow enhancer (which I think is a sort of detergent) - I emphasise that I am not unduly concerned, but this is the worst coverage problem I've had with this kind of paint in this context.

[I wonder what happened to that chess set, by the way.]

Just Another Half Fort, Please...

When I first started fiddling around with sieges - maybe 6 years ago now - I bought myself half a fort. Having studied my Chris Duffy book, I decided that half a fort on one edge of a table gave a useful "slice" of a full siege ("slice" as in "pizza"), and I have used this set up from time to time since then.

I am still short of some decent-looking siege trenches, but I know what sort of cross-section of hardwood mouldings will give me something useable, so it's just a matter of getting around to that bit. The fort itself has always been a work in progress anyway (a "works in progress", perhaps?). The hardware I invested in was the 15mm scale "Vauban Pack" offered by Terrain Warehouse (circa 2009), and it came pre-painted to a decent standard. TW offered a limited range of pieces, but the general format looked more useful than some of the alternatives (someone makes a square fort, for example), and the configuration is hexagonal, which sits rather nicely with my hex-gridded table, apart from anything else.

The TW products did not include gatehouses, or damaged sections, or very much in the way of flexibility, and the glacis sections as manufactured forced you into a limited number of shapes and patterns, but it seemed good for cutting my teeth on. I intended to get more pieces as time and funds permitted, to give a larger installation, and to adapt items from other makers and scratch build to add sophistication (or "fiddly bits" to use Vauban's own technical term).

I kept meaning to get around to this. At one point, around 2011, I read that Terrain Warehouse were offering the rights and moulds for their scenery range for sale, and I was panicked into getting in touch, but I let things slide again and the fort remained a half-fort.

The sections I have are:

4 straight wall sections (each 100mm long, to give an idea of proportions)
3 bastions
2 ravelins
plus sufficient glacis sections to match all of these

The illustration at the top shows this lot laid out.

Well, the latest news is that I am now in touch with the guys who bought the Vauban Fort rights from the previous guys who bought them from Terrain Warehouse. The pieces are not currently in production, but it seems likely that if I specify exactly what I want they should be able to make the sections. Whether they will paint and flock them for me I do not know yet (though I'm confident that I could handle that bit myself). I don't want to say too much about who and where and what until things are more definite, but it looks promising.

So if I could get pieces and glacis bits to give me a full circular fort that would be very nice. This, in turn, would involve me in hunting out and modifying and scratch-building the required Fiddly Bits to keep Vauban happy, allow the townspeople to get in and out and model some particular fortress or other. Since these pieces are required mostly for a Peninsular setting, I am also keen to be able to blend the Vauban pieces in with older, medieval or renaissance fortifications to produce the sort of scruffy hybrid which was the normal installation in Spain. Imagine me cutting and flocking glacis sections, covered up to my elbows in glue and green fluff, happy as a pig in wassname.

I'm currently working out what bits I need to get this started, and I'll send some drawings to these mysterious new owners. I reckon another 2 wall sections, 3 bastions and 2 ravelins, plus glacis to fit, will give me a full fort, and I might get some extra bits for the odd outwork if I can see how to do that. I've also checked out the available gates and drawbridges and suchlike from Magister Militum - all very interesting. As and when I make some progress I'll publish an update on how it's going.

Picture of my fort in action, taken by Clive (The Old Metal Detector) during a
play-test in Summer 2010, with additional buildings by JR, Hovels and others,
plus the odd chair (photo used without permission - thanks, Clive)

Further down Lilliput Lane – more eBay adventures

The inflow of collectable cottages is stopping – there are still a couple of items in the mail, but I am running out of enthusiasm and storage space at about the same rate. Interestingly, this week a couple of the “Sue” ladies (see previous post) were named Amanda and Carol, which I suppose is acceptable, but two of the sellers turned out to be blokes, which was more of a surprise, and (even more interestingly) I had my first eBay Lilliput Lane-related problems with these same male sellers.

Picture at the top is of a pleasant group made up of four David Winter Tudor cottages and a Lilliput Lane church, complete with passing cavalry unit to give the scale comparison. Nothing earth-shaking, but the most expensive building on display here is the church, which was, I think, £3-something. I am contemplating a forthcoming ECW campaign in a hitherto-undiscovered part of Lancashire, which involves a couple of decent-sized towns and a possible siege or two, so buildings of this type are most welcome.

My eBay adventures were instructive, and not particularly tedious, so I shall relate something of my dealings with the male sellers.

Case Study No.1 – Adam

Adam listed a single lot of two David Winter cottages, starting bid £0.99p, with a pretty hefty shipping charge of £9.50. Blinking at the P&P, I put a maximum bid of £1.25, and got them for 99p, with no other watchers, as far as I could see. Did the PayPal thing straight away (before I forget!) and looked forward to seeing what sort of velvet-cushion-accompanied-by-dancing-girls delivery service I got for my £9.50.

It was perfectly standard customer drop-off by Hermes, which for a parcel of this weight costs £3.98. Adam is obviously one of those eBayers who likes to load the shipping charges and put in a cheap starting price. I’m not sure that eBay actually disapprove, but I do – I’m not keen on this practice at all.

Just for the hell of it, I sent Adam a polite note (and at this point I had fulsome feedback from him, but I had not yet done the feedback for him, so I had a tactical edge), emphasizing that I had no grounds for complaint, since I had agreed to the purchase, but could he please explain the shipping cost.

I got a rant by return. Adam went on at considerable length about the unfairness of the fees charged by eBay and PayPal, the cost to him of doing the packing and travelling to the courier, and how I could hardly complain getting two such fine cottages for this amount of money. He also explained that if I wanted a postage discount I should have asked for the shipping on the two cottages to be combined, and he would have considered whether he could afford it, which is, basically, straight bollocks, since the two items were a single listing, and were combined already.

Tiring of Adam, who was less fun than I had hoped, I withdrew from the debate and left sort of sketchy feedback for him. If the cottages had been £5 for the two plus £5 shipping I would have been perfectly happy – as I am, in fact – so he’s correct, in a daft sort of way. It is a shame that he seems to get so little fun from his eBay involvement – the Sues do much better in this respect. One of them, bless her, sent me a lollipop with her business card – now that is classy.

Case Study No.2 – Colin

Colin is not a lucky man. I purchased another David Winter house for very little from Colin, paid for it, and got a notification that the item was mailed 1^st Class on 21^st July. By the 28^th there was no sign of it, so I sent Colin a friendly note to say that I wasn’t unduly worried, but thought I should let him know.

I got a lengthy reply from him, to the effect that he had, unfortunately, been involved in an accident the previous week, and had been hospitalized, had had an adverse reaction to the painkillers he was prescribed, and was in very poor shape indeed. He had arranged with his father (who is elderly, an army veteran, and suffers occasional lapses of memory) for the week’s parcels, which were all packed and ready to go, to be posted, but it had all gone wrong for various further reasons.

I sympathized with his misfortune, told him I’d be delighted to get the package whenever he could manage it, and not to worry about it. There was a faint whiff of Foy’s Seventh Law about the explanations, but no matter.

True to his word, Colin emailed me the following day to say that he had battled his way to the post office, and the parcel should reach me the next day. And so it did, and I was very pleased with it, though I was surprised when I found a note offering his repeated apologies for the delay and the “mix-up” – the note was inside the packing, next to the miniature house. No problem at all – pleased with the item, very cheap purchase, but – would you undo and then re-wrap an already-complete package to put in an apology? No? – neither would I.

You don’t suppose he had just forgotten, surely? No – of course not. To be on the safe side, in future I deal only with eBay sellers named Sue...

I am still looking forward to receiving a very attractive, period town hall of suitable proportions, which I obtained for very little, though it is No.68 of a limited edition of - I can't remember how many, in fact. You get an idea of what kind of an outsider I am in this field of collecting when I tell you that I am thinking of how best to prise said town hall off its handsome wooden plinth. Proper collectors the world over would wring their hands and weep at such an act of desecration.

Heavy on the Cute – the World of Sue

More Confessions of a Closet Lilliput Lane Fancier

English windmill, Sir?

My recent coming-out as a browser of Lilliput Lane listings on eBay has landed me a number of excellent items of ECW scenery, and has been quite an education. I am, I sincerely hope, a fringe player here, but I have seen enough to be intrigued and sometimes horrified by the real deal.

Here’s the technique – enter “Lilliput Lane” and some other promising key word like “manor house” or “smithy” or “church” in the eBay search field, and have a look at what’s on offer. Don’t look at the prices at this point or you will run for cover, screaming. Find something you like the look of, and skip through ads for this item until you find one that gives physical size, so you can check it’s OK for scale (usually the serious retailers will give a full spec and lots of photos, but their prices will be off-putting).

Or a very serviceable manor house for ECW, for £2.25? 

I use 20mm wargames figures (Les Higgins, Hinton Hunt, SHQ, Tumbling Dice), and I deliberately use underscale buildings – the most suitable of the Lilliput Lane items work out at a slightly smallish 15mm scale, which is good for me. Having identified a suitable candidate item (and I like “retired” items best – current catalogue stuff and recent releases are dominated by heavyweight pro dealers, and therefore are too dear), I do a specific search on that, and then list the items by price, cheapest first, and the unknown, perfumed, faintly purple world of ladies’ eBay opens before me.

There are some astonishing bargains, and some of them still have boxes and certificates (which are wasted on me) and many of them are pretty much perfect. There is a whole alternative reality out there of ladies who deal in secondhand party frocks (size 14) and shoes (silver, stiletto heels, worn once only) and assorted gifty tat and shelf clutter, especially LL cottages and chromium plated photo frames. These ladies live in Basildon, or Bournemouth, or Slough, and they are – almost all of them – named Sue, and they are all lovely.

The Sue thing is quite amazing – almost an essential qualification; I did buy a nice little half-timbered cottage, perfect, for 99 pence from a lady whose eBay ID was molly*moppet or similar, but I was relieved to find that her real name was actually Sue, so that was all right. She was brilliant – postage fees were exactly correct, the care of packing and the amount of bubblewrap were well in excess of what I would have done for 99 miserable pence, she posted it the same day and left me nice, gushy feedback which was so extreme that for a brief moment I glowed with my supreme status as an eBay customer, until I checked and found that all her buyers get the same message of love and appreciation.

Preston Mill - the real building is at East Linton, in East Lothian, about 6 miles
from where I'm sitting; Montrose could well pass this way...

Why Sue? The Contesse and I discussed this briefly, and we reckon that Sue was a very popular name in Britain for baby girls maybe 50-something years ago, and that this is the typical age at which ladies achieve their lifelong wish to sell used party frocks and ornaments and gush at total strangers. And God bless them all – I have no complaints.

The price spread is astonishing – I bought a flawless (though unboxed) Claypotts Castle for £2 or something the same week that a dealer was selling it, used and "rare", as Buy-It-Now for £32.99.

Convincing Lonsdale-area farm; watch out - some of them have hidden Land Rovers 

I’ve had a couple of disappointments – paid £1.25 for a David Winter mansion house which turned out to be just over an inch tall, but that can go into the local charity shop – some nice lady will be delighted to buy it, I’m sure, and stick it on eBay. Mostly everything has been very pleasing. You have to be selective – this is a huge, bewildering topic area when you start looking around – and you have to watch the sizes and the close-up pics, but the number of items and the choice is staggering.

Storage is an issue – the buildings are quite heavy and will chip easily, and are maybe not just what you wish to have lying about your bookshelves, but careful use of bubblewrap and old shoe boxes should take care of that (I can send the shoes to Sue for auction). I’m going to stop browsing the listings now – I’ve got some very decent items so far, and there are a couple more in the post.

Cornish tin mine - could just as easily be a Scottish lead mine

One word of warning – stay away from the collector forums, for that is a twilight world and you may become frightened. That is where you get into the debates about why the original version of Lupin Cottage (retired in 1987) is worth so much more than the later version (though I cannot tell the two photos apart) and why we all have to put our names down for this year’s special Members-only Limited Edition Piece, Windsor Castle in the Snow, which will (of course) be a magnificent investment to leave to your grandchildren (who, as I am beginning to understand, will get Sue to sell it on eBay for 99 pence).   

Scenery – Lilliput Lane!

It feels as though I have always been aware of the Lilliput Lane range of miniature buildings – I regard them as collectibles for oldies with an excess of pocket money and shelf space. Not very interesting, not my kind of thing, overpriced and far too cute for my taste, but certainly very nice if that’s what you like.

Hinton Hunt 20mm ECW soldiers with Lilliput Lane Scottish buildings - not bad?

A few years ago I made a conscious (and not easy) decision to use underscale buildings on my wargame table – my figures are sort of 1/72-ish, which translates to about 20mm, but I use 15mm scale buildings as a matter of policy. They look fine, they take up less space on the battlefield (and are therefore a bit less of an offence against the age-old mismatch of vertical and ground scales in the games) and they are, of course, cheaper than their bigger cousins.

My Peninsular War buildings are of various makes and came from various places – I like resin buildings, and I enjoy painting them myself. I am aware that I have buildings from Eureka, Hovels, JR Miniatures, Battlezone and others I can’t remember. Sometimes the scale slips downwards a bit – some of my buildings, judging by the ease with which the men could pass through the doors, are a bit tight even for 15mm, but it’s amazing how the convenience numbs your sensitivity to this inaccuracy. It is true that an HO or 25mm church would look more natural with the miniature soldiers, but this is more than outweighed by the fact that it would be the size of a fair-sized village on the battlefield.

My standard issue, home-painted 15mm Hovels

When I started on the ECW, I bought in a pile of Hovels Medieval, Northern European and “English Rural” series buildings, and some rather more Germanic things from JR, and I’ve been working my way through the painting of these as time permits. When my interest in this period suddenly performed a lateral arabesque in the direction of Montrose and his chums, I had a need for some Scottish looking buildings, and was surprised when a search on eBay for “Scottish” and “buildings” threw up some examples of Lilliput Lane products. Of course, most of them were unsuitable, and prices were generally very unsuitable indeed, but there were a few very interesting examples on offer.

I am not a convert, I will not blossom into a collector, but there are a number of very useful pieces out there. There are a few problems, apart from price – these items are all sorts of different sizes and scales, and very few sellers bother to put dimensions in the listings; the models themselves are collectible without any attempt to have a constant scale - having said which, Lilliput have recently produced their “Full Steam Ahead” series, which are specifically targeted at (very wealthy) N-Gauge model railway enthusiasts.

The trick is to ignore the new stuff and the listings aimed at serious collectors – there are some real bargains among the clearances of someone’s late grannie’s bits and pieces, especially if, like me, you could not care less about the missing box and deed (certificate of authenticity), and are happy to get out the paints to touch up chips and scratches. In fact, I have been known to drybrush some erstwhile collectible with Khaki Mist #4 to tone down the colours a bit – enough to send genuine LL collectors screaming for therapy.

I am also happy to snip off the happy wedding couple from a rural church scene (or lose them inside a tree), so I am a real heretic in the LL world. It is also necessary, of course, to check on sizes. I have had a couple of minor failures, but they can always be stood on the top of a distant hill, or put back on eBay – how can I lose at these prices?

On the face of it, this would make a decent wargames piece - bad news is
this is a limited edition, so I'd have to sell my own house to buy it. Nah - not
suitable, far too collectible for me...

A complete battlefield covered with LL buildings would be an abhorrence by any standards – the more complicated set-pieces cover too much ground anyway, and do not lend themselves to having soldiers placed as a garrison – but I am now keeping a gentle eye open for suitable bargains on eBay – mixed in with the Hovels and similar they can look impressive, and they give extra interest.

I am currently chasing a nice little windmill which looks just about right to stand on the next hill from my Hovels mill, and there are a number of slightly chipped manor houses which would go well as the centrepiece of a village or a siege scenario. I’m a bit embarrassed about it, to tell the truth, but it’s all good fun.

Unsung Heroes of Wargaming - Tony Barr

Apart from the high-profile master makers and rule writers, and the great names of Old School wargaming, there are a lot of chaps in the hobby who don't get the credit they are due, I think.

One such is Tony Barr, at East Riding Miniatures, who supplies me with a lot of laser-cut MDF bases, sabots and scenic tiles. His pieces are more accurately made than those of some of his more expensive competitors, his prices are very reasonable, his website is easy to use and well maintained and - above all else - he is helpful and personable and prepared to indulge all the oddballs like me who want weird shapes and custom sizes.

Such a faultless service becomes an easy thing to take for granted, and I am very sorry to learn that Tony has been unwell and in hospital, and will be convalescing for a while. I'm ashamed to say that it is at such times that we remember to appreciate properly the amount of help and support we get from our regular suppliers - I hope you will join me in wishing Tony all the very best for a full recovery.

What the Hex That Thing?

Well, since you asked, that's the first instalment of my new Stack-o-Hex scenic plates, manufactured to order and sent to me by Uncle Tony at ERM. They are 7 inches across the flats, same as my table hexes, and are laser-cut from 3mm MDF. They are going to be painted in the regulation baseboard green (Dulux Crested Moss #1) and then will be adorned with various hand-painted sections of road, stream, village and wood bases and so on - whatever else takes my fancy, or is required by whimsical scenarios (what's the plural of scenario - could it be scenariones? - hmmm...).

3mm weight is heavier than I intended, but it makes a neater job, and will help avoid warping - they are also less liable to slide about in moments of stress than thinner ones would be.

This is all a reaction to the embarrassment I felt as the result of deploying some old laminated paper scenic plates at my recent Battle of Nantwich. I'll work away at a few examples of the new type, and once I know what I am doing I'll crack on. The idea is to keep them flat and pretty much flock-free, so they stack in a compact manner and don't get damaged much. There will be some plain green ones, too, so that I can, if I need to, buy myself a little extra level ground to position houses around the edges of a BUA.

The little unit of 20mm French sappers is just to give an idea of what a 7 inch hex looks like. This is, after all, sort of a job for the engineers.

Boom in Very Old Property Continues

I've been pretty much out of things for a fortnight with the accursed flu, which, as ever, has hit harder and lasted longer than my own patience or the available sympathy window allows.

Better today - going into Edinburgh to see a concert tonight, armed with sucky sweeties to avoid my coughing the acts into silence. On the hobby front I've done a few lightweight organisation chores - fitting out more A4 box files with steel paper - stuff like that - and I've continued to work away at my supply of 15mm buildings for the ECW. Steady progress continues, though I may eventually convince myself to do a little re-work to tone down a couple of my paler thatch roofs. These little Hovels castings are really nice to work with, though I'm finding the finished buildings are a bit of a nuisance to store safely.

As I've progressed through the stock of unpainted resin over recent weeks, I did a lot of checking with the painted examples on Hovels' website, to see how they are intended to look, and as my confidence has grown I have found that I am frequently setting about doing something different. In particular, since my intended theatre for the ECW is the North West, I've had a go at producing some buildings which are a bit less obviously Cotswold Stone than standard. I am pleased with the little brick smithy shown here, and especially with the Bunter Sandstone mansion house, though it does bother me a bit that it looks like a childhood memory of Rathbone Road school in Liverpool - if it had bright green railings it would be the complete thing.

I'm going to have a go at a dark sandstone church next. And a timber windmill, though the mill is a real construction kit job with cast metal sails and everything.

I've been reading David Johnson's Adwalton Moor of late. It is written in heavily correct "thesis" style, and took a little getting into, but I have been won over. Great little book. The detective work involved in unscrambling old references and old maps, to get a picture of the battlefield as it was in 1643, is especially fascinating. I have also been very impressed by the accepted de facto form of classification of events in the ECW into "of general interest" and "of interest only to local study groups" - a whole pile of stuff I have suspected but never seen written down before. Recommended book for any ECW enthusiasts.

For anyone who is interested in the funny way us northern folk speak, Adwalton appears to have been pronounced "Adderton" or even "Atherton" in 1643. By 'eck.

More Old Houses

Last night I moved on to a couple of the half-timbered buildings, which require some new techniques, and learned quite a lot. In my boyhood, I had a sad experience with the old Airfix OO inn, and was scarred by it. I now realise that I tried too hard - you can't paint everything that's there, and if you do manage to succeed it will just look like a model of a house, rather than a house. [With the greatest of respect, Airfix kits never looked like real houses anyway.]

In fact, painting the Hovels buildings is a delight, because the sculptor has made such a nice job of them that all you have to do is identify what is there, and let it emerge by itself - the rougher the dry-brushing the more building-like will be the results. The half-timbered houses appear to come in two types - one is the expected finish, with the gaps between the beams plastered, and the other has the gaps filled with wicker, or maybe it is wattle-without-the-daub, choose your nomenclature.

The biggest act of faith is finishing off the whole building with the driest of dry brushings of a Dulux shade called "Khaki Mists 3" (which is not exactly poetic, you marketing people), to make it look dirty - to stop it looking like a kid's drawing of a newly built house on a Pergamon estate. Or so I imagine, in my apprenticeship - the act of faith is trusting that the brush is dry enough - too much paint and I am basically going to have to start all over again. An experienced eye might check what I've done and chuckle, "oh no - not the Khaki Mist 3 overbrush..."

Anyway - excellent entertainment for a snowy evening. While painting some terracotta pantile roofs, I was reminded that such tiles are very common in rural areas around here in East Lothian. A visitor once commented to me that some of the old cottages here have a surprisingly Mediterranean look for the Frozen North, and the answer is exactly straightforward - the roof-tiles are Mediterranean, and traditionally so. When the ships carrying coal from the mines of East Lothian used to deliver to Spain and Portugal (and we are talking sailing ships here), they would fill up with the local roof-tiles to ballast them for the return voyage - there was always a steady market for them. Which - in turn - reminds me that when we got our house extension built in 2005 we roofed it with Spanish slate, which seems a pleasing continuation of an old tradition, but in reality was mostly because we couldn't afford Welsh slate, and the council planners gave us a choice of only the two.

Garvald, East Lothian, with roof tiles in evidence

As a silly background task, I am mentally collecting suitable place names for the ECW. My intention is to focus on an area (probably largely mythical) around Lancashire and Lonsdale - though you might struggle to find this area exactly on a historical map. I am very taken with The Perfect Captain's (free download) Battlefinder system, which uses map cards to create battlefields and campaign terrain. I intend to make use of this in my forthcoming efforts, but the names of the places - though excellent - are not quite right for the gruff North. I thought it would be amusing to tweak a personal set of the Battlefinder cards to use more suitable names - it would also individualise the game a bit, which is usually worth the effort.

Thus I hope to have a bit less of the Pumphet Mauleverer and Castle Mauvoisin (I may have made these up) and a bit more Clagthwaite and similar. I love the whole subject of placenames, wherever they are. The North of England has some great names - I think Northumberland and Durham may have the best of the lot. Among so many, my personal favourites include Wide Open, near Newcastle, and the wonderful Pity Me, in County Durham. Long ago, I had reason to write to someone who lived at Hag House Farm, Pity Me, and I still treasure that address as a classic. If you happen to live there, no offence is intended at all, but it conjures up images which would not fit with the more comfortable Home Counties.

Since I am now rambling, I shall close.  

Infrastructure

Back numbers - a pile of old number labels which have been removed and replaced

Messing around, more like. I got the revised unit numbers all worked out, swapped all the labels over, and am now left with the task of typing up list amendments. I have produced an accurate conversion table, so with a bit of luck I'm hoping to write a little program to use this table to amend the file-names of all my photograph library to match the new numbers.

I realise this is likely to end in tears, so have carefully produced a copy folder to play around with. I'll do this next bit when I've thought about it, and when I'm more awake, tomorrow.

I've also started on painting some 17th Century buildings. There are a lot of these, so I've started with what look like easy ones - I've left the half-timbered stuff until I've got my eye in and my confidence up with the dry-brushing. Good fun so far. These are all Hovels 15mm. I like painting houses, because it's quick and low-stress.

I'd like to be able to claim that the poor lighting didn't show off my house
painting to advantage, but it would be a lie 

Thanks to Xavier, who emailed me to point out that the numeric labels on my unit sabots are not actually Blick labels, they are Avery labels. He's correct, of course. I used to use Blick labels of this type, but they are not made now, so I use Avery. The Avery labels are fine, apart from the fact that the adhesive is not so good, and for some reason the set contains a typo - the number 110 does not appear, a duplicate number 100 being printed instead. Probably makes them more valuable. I have a couple of old Blick 110s which have been carefully re-glued a few times.

Best solution is just to withhold number 110...

Tree Blight

For the scenic aspects of my wargaming I use - pretty much exclusively - very old Merit trees. These were made by J & L Randall Ltd, whose range of HO/OO railway accessories is legendary, and I have a lot of them, in the three known varieties, some dating back to the late 1950s, I would guess. Some of my oldest fir trees of this type were among the very earliest trackside scenic add-ons for my first model railway (if anyone cares, my first loco was the Hornby Dublo LMS "Duchess of Atholl", which was prehistoric even when I first got it).

The definitive posting on Merit is in Clive's wonderful Hinton Hunter blog, here. I love these trees. I'm not completely sure why - they don't look especially realistic, to be sure, but they are part of that old black-and-white tradition in Terry Wise's early books and elsewhere, they are clean and practical, and I have come to take them for granted as part of my own arrangements. I have also owned much more expensive and exotic trees from all sorts of specialist makers, and they have come and gone - literally - like the withering leaves. Storage is never satisfactory with the de-luxe jobs, and I have a lifelong hatred of foliage flock detritus - no doubt a symptom of a heavily anal upbringing, but also of the permanent need to have wargaming co-exist pleasantly and harmoniously with the other activities of formal dining-rooms etc. So all the fancy stuff has passed on, yet I still have the Merit trees, augmented now and then by finds on eBay and elsewhere. The prices have become a bit silly - especially for someone like me who doesn't even keep the original boxes.

Shock horror. My world is now threatened by the gradual deterioration of my trees. The plastic, over all this time, has started to change. The rot is uneven, but some of them now have the structural properties of spun sugar, and are extremely delicate. I try to glue damage as it occurs, but I can see that my HO/OO plastic ecosphere is showing signs of sliding into history. This is not a trivial matter - I really don't know what I shall do if I have to replace them. No-one has ever made a direct equivalent and - very sadly indeed - the re-issue of almost the entire Merit range by Modelscene has specifically excluded the trees. I gather that the moulds were beyond redemption, and it has been suggested to me that they are unlikely to reappear, since modern flocked trees are so good now, and only a crazed nostalgist would want the Merit items.

I can almost feel the tears welling up as I write this. I shall continue to look after the trees I have left, but this is beginning to feel like a real ecological issue - does no-one care if, along with the red squirrel, my silly old trees disappear? I have to stop now - can't go on...