Sieges: Back to the Little Stuff

Suitably inspired by all the work being done in my garden, I took the opportunity this afternoon to return my attention to the toys - to clean up and sort out some of my siege bits and pieces, and make more sense of the way they are stored. 

As I'm learning (and I'm quite happy about it - the amount of kit is a large part of the spectacle and the enjoyment), tabletop sieges use a lot of scenic pieces. I already had a good collection of walls and defences and buildings - medieval and Vauban-period - and I now have a growing mass of earthworks, gun emplacements and so on, to support serious sieges. I really do need to get this lot stored in a logical and practical way. So work is under way!

 

Here's something strange spread across the attic floor - there are 4 trays of hand-made trench sections (which can also double as earth walls placed in front of pre-gunpowder stone defences) and gun emplacements, all supplied by the excellent Fat Frank, then, at the front, a tray of assorted cast-resin pieces, various makers (I note that a few of these still need painting, by the way).

In the left foreground, open, is a badly thought-out view of a brown wooden cigar box containing 4" x 1" brown felt strips - these are for use as forward saps in my Vauban's Wars games (and, of course, any other games which might wish to borrow them). My starting idea is that you get two of these strips as a single piece of Sapper Activity action, when cued by the appropriate Sequence Card. You may lay them as you wish. Obviously, the speed of forward sapping will be closely related to how obliquely you place the strips - in the house parlance, to the angle of zig-zag. If your sap is enfiladed from the defences, you have done it wrong. There are no excuses. The closer you get to the fortress, the more extreme will be the zig-zag profile of the sap, and thus the slower the rate of approach.

There is another box (closed) at about 3 o'clock in the picture - again, not a great visual - in there is my collection of assorted multiple and single gabions - some of which also need some paint, now I look at them.

I propose to put the Fat Frank pieces in a box of their own, since this will be the main supply for the building of parallels and batteries by the busy besiegers. The rest can be stored separately as a back-up supply.

Near the top of the picture are a couple of very old Bellona gun positions, which are really just present for old-times' sake.

[In the real world, my driveway is now ready for the gravel, and one of the two trees nominated for removal has been severely wrecked - about two-thirds of the bulk has gone, though the main "frame" of trunk and big branches is to be removed tomorrow, along with, I hope, most of the second tree. Good progress - we've been very lucky with the weather.]

Tubs and Jars and Boxes

Today is my last chance to cut the lawns before the gardener comes tomorrow - it's raining. You may wonder why there is some pressure to get this job done if the gardener is coming. Partly this is a matter of self-respect, if I don't do the lawns between his visits, there is just a whiff of smug contempt when he comes; more seriously, I begrudge paying him for time spent doing a job I could (should) have done myself - there is no way I am about to climb up the big hedge with a ladder and a petrol trimmer - that's what I want to be paying him for!

So this morning I am doing a little tidying around the house. I thought I might take some pictures of the various hobby jobs I have around the place this week. The pervading theme seems to be one of storage, but it was ever thus, I guess.

Dragoons in the bath - these should be a very easy refurb job - 1st & 3rd British Dragoons soaking in a very mild detergent wash, to clean off half a century of muck and the remains of the cardboard bases. I'll get them retouched and varnished, and mount them on their new MDF bases, leaving gaps...

...for their officers and trumpeters, who will need a little more work!

Meanwhile, I have been doing some more editing and testing of my (slowly) evolving WSS rules, which are really shaping up nicely. The last big job will be to produce an intelligible leaflet and a decent QRS. You may observe a rather flexible approach to a hex gridded battlefield.

Whiteboards are very useful chaps - this is version 23.5 of the Firing Rules, which is pretty stable now - we are getting somewhere when there are no swear-words in the draft!

War in a Box - this is the current state of the WSS armies, and - yes - the bases are magnetised, and the Really Useful Boxes are lined with Ferro Sheet (the stuff which replaced Steel Paper).

Look, there are soldiers in there!

A jar of Imperialists - there is a delay with the Regt Hasslingen - about 16 or 17 of their number are pickling in the stripper jar; this is Clean Spirit (not so clean), and the fellow at the front looks just about ready for the toothbrush.

This is the next big job on the Refurb front - 3 battalions of French Napoleonic light infantry. I'm not going to start this for a week or two - I have to prepare for a Zoom battle, scheduled for Friday, anyway. You will observe that there are some bare-metal boys in there, and there's a full house of bayonets. Rank and file are 1970s Les Higgins, the command figures are already painted, and mounted on the bases, waiting. Command are a mix of SHQ and Higgins - the eagle bearers are plastic - nothing else available in this scale at present - but their flagpoles are brass, which is a relief all round.

Champs de Mars - August 2019

Today my wife is trekking along the coast, from just north of Berwick to St Abbs, with her walking group, so I'm busy doing some work sorting out The Cupboard. Nothing very exciting - just a delayed Spring clean, to shift the Anglo-Portuguese down one shelf, clear out some scenery pieces and odd junk, re-organise the French army to give more room to accommodate the new units coming from the Refurb, and smarten up the layout of the A4 boxfiles which hold the overflow.

It makes sense to empty the lot, and do a bit of cleaning and tidying. Since this involves laying the troops out so I can change the shelf order, a photograph or two seems appropriate - it's a while since I did a full army photo.

So today's presentation is the French army - the lighting and my photography could certainly be better, but I hope you enjoy the pics. I'm delighted that inspection reveals no damage, which is not really a surprise but is a bit of a relief anyway.

From this end, the columns are Confederation infantry, then Italians plus King Joseph's Spaniards, then 5 columns of French infantry, then the Imperial Guard (with the band at the head!), then dragoons (with various generals and marshals at the rear), then light cavalry, then cuirassiers; at the far (right) end, the field artillery is in front, behind them is the siege artillery, then the garrison artillery, at the back are the engineers, with some logistics stuff alongside

As we used to joke, never mind the quality, feel the width!

Storage Wars - Boxed Bavarians

Deroy's Division on the move

One of the great truths of the world is that painted soldiers take up a lot less space than soldiers which are being painted, or which are about to be painted. In the chaos presented by my current situation, which I refer to as "getting there", my inner OCD keeps a little vision of how it should work out...

When the Spanish Army is finished, when the missing Portuguese Brigade is finished, when a number of other incomplete projects are finished, I'll have a lot fewer Very Useful Boxes containing unpainted units sorted into freezer packs, a lot fewer cardboard boxes full of things still to be promoted to labelled freezer packs (or, ultimately, disposed of). My main "showcase" storage unit (which is a laugh, since no-one can see into it unless they open the doors), known here as The Cupboard, will correctly contain the Napoleonic French and Anglo-Portuguese armies (minus the artillery, logistics vehicles and staff, since they won't fit), and everything else will be stored in an orderly manner in magnetised A4 boxfiles.

I'll have a lot more space - it will work - I will be able to find things - I have the spreadsheets to prove it...

This is not entirely down to my becoming more peculiar as I age, though a big driver is the ease with which I am able lose entire regiments - for a recent battle, I dug my heels in and refused to give up on searching for a French general in a carriage - it took about an hour, but eventually I found him in a boxfile labelled Mules & Carts - that's not too good, is it? Happy ending, and he got to be Massena for the day, but things have to become more organised. He should really have been in French Staff & Odd-Bods, obviously, but that is now full, and waiting for French Staff & Odd-Bods (2) to be commissioned.

The current (ongoing) expansion of my French army means that The Cupboard has to be cleared of anything that shouldn't really be in there - the buildings have mostly gone, the strange little wooden trays of things that came from eBay and are still being thought about are in the process of being relocated. Yesterday's big step was to re-house my Bavarians into official boxfiles. That has always been the plan really, but I'm kind of sorry to see them move - I've got used to seeing them lined up on the bottom shelf, but they have to shift so that Ferey's Division and Taupin's Division and the new Guard Division can be accommodated properly in their rightful place.

Anyway, they'll be happier in their new home. I thought someone might enjoy the sight of a couple of boxes of Bavarians - the dragoons and three brigade commanders are still be be painted, but it is evident that a Bavarian division fits neatly into two A4 boxes. That's rather satisfying. A Bavarian division, in passing, is a nicely-sized and balanced force for a wargame, it seems to me. This morning's extra task will be to replace the household's labelling machine, which finally died of exhaustion...

Hooptedoodle #293 - Rage over a Lost Pike

Bad title - couldn't think of anything decent, offhand. In fact it was hardly an episode worthy of rage, a few minutes anxiety, at most; also, the pike was not lost, it was simply - erm - in the wrong place, so "found" would have been closer.

Marston Moor game coming up next weekend. I've had a lot of very enjoyable sorting out to do - some figure painting (to make/balance up the numbers), some scenario tweaking for the rules, and - over the last few days - an extended wrangle to get a "best fit" of my available toy units for the regiments that were really present. Thus (for example), since I have a fair collection for the First ECW in Lancashire and Cheshire, the regiments of Assheton and Rigby and Tyldesley can simply play as themselves, and I have a fair representation of the Covenanters of 1644, so that also drops into place nicely, but the Eastern Association (for example) is outside my normal area of activity, so some role-playing will be needed. Robert Ellice's Welsh Royalists will be pressed into service as someone else, and much more of the same, so there will be plenty of scope for identifying wrong flags when the photos appear!

This "best fit" exercise involved more note-scribbling and fiddling about than I expected, so I decided to BlueTak some simple little labels onto the unit bases, to keep us right on the day and to preserve my studies so far. Thus I spent an excellent evening messing around on the dining table, cutting out laminated labels, attempting to get BlueTak to stick to something other than my fingertips, and so on. This required a lot of coffee and a few hours of Debussy.

Because Marston Moor will be the biggest pike and shot game I've ever attempted, I had to label up almost my entire collection of ECW figures, and then tidy everything away in the A4 box-files, ready for next week. Anyone with experience of Medieval and Renaissance wargaming will be aware of the scope for accidents and collateral damage when working with miniature pike-blocks.

I accept it as a necessary precaution to have a tube of superglue handy on the battlefield. My pikes are deliberately made of florist's wire, so they will bend before they damage the figures, and they will not injure any of the players (depending, I suppose, on how hard they are thrown), but they have certainly been known to detach themselves in the heat of battle. Hence the glue and the running repairs. If you leave it until later, the pike will be lost, or you won't get around to it, or whatever.

Well, I completed my labelling exercise carefully, managed to get everything tidied away, got the box-files back on their shelves without dropping the whole lot at once (one of the little-discussed advantages of box-files) and then, when I was sorting out the paperwork, I found a stray pike on the table.

Uh-oh! [arrows supplied by editorial staff so you can see the problem]

Right.

I've got pretty good at this stuff now - it took me only about 20 minutes to schlepp the boxes back through into the dining room (without dropping them), check each box of soldiers for missing pikes (all OK, in fact) and store them away again (without dropping them). Nothing missing, though of course there's that little thrill of tension right until the last box. The rogue pike must be from the spares department - looking at the type of wire, I guess it is from either the Mike & Whiskers collection I got from eBay or else some leftovers I have from a shipment of old figures I bought from Harry Pearson. Whatever it is, the important point is that it is not from my proposed field armies, so that is all right.

Pink = ECW

That's 16 of these beggars to check through

It also provides a timely reminder that PIKES ARE DANGEROUS, that some damage to the toys is inevitable when playing this period and - importantly - any damage should be recoverable and repairable with minimum effort. The florists' wire is invaluable, though I still wish they made it in brown. I have a factory process for painting green pikes brown - not a problem, but fiddly.

If a tree is in a box and no-one sees it, is it really there?

Well I haven't had any activity on the give-away quiz for a few days now, so - since I am in for a busy weekend - I decided to close a day early. Thanks to everyone who sent an estimate of the original value of the trees in the boxes. One slight shock was how unfamiliar and illogical the old British currency seems now.

There are 107 individual fir trees in the boxes - you probably can't quite see all of them, but I was looking for an estimate. I know it is 107 because I had 85 good trees and recently I obtained an additional 22, and also I can confirm that the number of magnetic patches I attached to them is 107. And, of course, I counted them again, to check. That should about do it.

107 trees, at 6-to-a-box, is 17-and-five-sixths boxes, which, at 3/11d a box (that's three-shillings-and-elevenpence, or 47 old pence a box), works out at close to £3:9:10d - that's three-pounds-nine-shillings-and-tenpence - or £3.49236. I did not bother to work it out in contemporary Mars Bars, since no-one seemed interested.

Best cost estimate came from Ross Mac, who doesn't want the prize and is therefore a Category B entrant (glory only). Ross's estimate of £3:3:7d was based on 16 and a half packs - 99 trees. If he had done the cost calculation more accurately, I think he'd have got £3:4:8d, which would have been even closer, but no matter - well done, Ross, the glory is yours.

The nearest estimate from Category A was Mark Dudley's £3:2:8d, so he wins the Lachouque booque (or Lachook book if you prefer). Mark - if you send me a comment (which I shall not publish) giving your postal address I'll get your prize to you.

Goya observed that, around 1960, when these were bought, three-pounds-something would not be far away from the average weekly wage of a manual worker supporting a family. Discuss...

Thanks again, everyone - them sums are harder than I remembered, man.

Can't See the Trees for the Wood - plus a small giveaway...

Well, you were warned. I now have my Merit Fir Tree collection safely housed in two wooden boxes. Yes, the trees have magnetic sheet on the bases and, yes, the boxes are lined with steel paper [was that a snort I heard from the back?]. My trees can now be transported in complete safety to most places you can think of. The boxes, by the way, are "Memory Boxes" - it is a very popular activity (I am told) to stow away photos, cuddly toys and all sorts of memorabilia to be kept safe for your descendants, or, I suppose, for yourself many years from now. Even someone else's descendants would do at a pinch - you get the idea - you leave something personal and precious - all you have to do is remember where you left the box, and who it was for.

Excellent. More relevantly, there are some good deals around at the moment on wooden memory boxes - worth checking out for odd storage problems.

Anyway, miserable beggar that I am, all I'm potentially leaving for posterity is my collection of plastic trees - I hope they are appreciated. As mentioned before, these Merit plastic accessories for model railways were manufactured by J & L Randall in the 1960s, and it says on one of my original Merit boxes that they were 3/11d a set - that's three-shillings-and-eleven-old-pence, or £0.19583 for half-a-dozen trees. This was in the days when a Mars Bar was 6d (£0.025) - just to put everything on an understandable footing.

Oh yes - the small giveaway. I have a spare copy of Henri Lachouque's "Napoleon's War in Spain" - in decent nick. If you are an existing follower of my blog (which includes regular email correspondents), then all you have to do is estimate from my photo what is the approximate original value of the fir trees in the two boxes (in Pounds Sterling, not Mars Bars) at 3/11d for a set of six trees - there is unlikely to be a round number of sets, of course. The book is a big format hardback, so if you live outside the UK I should be very pleased if you could help out with the postage charges.

Send a comment (which I shall not publish) with your estimate, or email me at the address in my Blogger profile - I'll award the book to the sender of the best estimate, and I'll keep this open until midnight at the end of 24th June.

****** Late Edit ******

Some perfectly reasonable protests from non-UK readers, not to mention UK readers who were never exposed to the pre-decimal money...

Just to confirm, there were 12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound (abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence were £, s and d) - so 240 old pennies in a pound.

Also to confirm, the number of trees shown here is not necessarily an exact number of boxes - for the purposes of the puzzle, ignore the fact that the assembled trees are different sizes and assume that each tree is one-sixth of a box...

A thought occurs to me - if you bought these from the high street hobby shop in 1960-something, the lady behind the counter would be able to work out how much so many lots of 3/11d added up to, without a calculator and without a barcode-reading till which did the sums and the stock control for her. This lady did not have a degree in arithmetic or anything, she just worked in a shop, and didn't get paid very much. Nowadays such things would be incomprehensible - even with decimal currency, most of us (including myself) rely on the automation.

The other thing that occurs, of course, is that the very idea of a hobby shop in your high street is pretty wild nowadays. 

I bought my first pack of Merit fir trees from the Post Office in Rose Lane, Allerton, Liverpool, circa 1959. My neighbour (and school chum) Hutchie and I combined our model railways (3-rail Hornby Dublo) into one slightly larger railway, but we fell out after about 3 weeks. Through some mystery which has never been explained, I lost an LMS guard's van in the redistribution. On the other hand, Hutchie seems to have lost 2 packs of Merit trees and 2 of Merit stone walls. I believe I still have them.

Dog eat dog.

This and That

I guess this post is mostly about OCD, and maybe ineptitude - both topics on which I might claim a small amount of expertise.

Topic 1: The Catalogue

Recently, in relaxed conversation, Stryker, having had the mixed pleasure of inspecting my Soldier Cupboard (in semi-darkness, on his knees - it's an architecture thing), asked, as one might, how many units there were in my armies. An innocent enough question, quite appropriate in the context.

The Cupboard - current state; these days it contains only the French and
Anglo-Portuguese cavalry and infantry...

I answered, correctly, that I really didn't know, which surprised him a little, and then the conversation moved on. Afterwards, I found I was actually slightly concerned that I didn't know. Firstly, there is a faint whiff of schoolboy bravado in the implication that I have so many units that I don't know how many there are - I wouldn't like to give that impression - that's a bit like claiming not to know how many yachts one owns. More worryingly, I felt it was more than a little odd that I didn't know - I should know, really, shouldn't I? If I were in control of this silly obsessive hobby thing then I would know.

Now I do maintain a very detailed catalogue of my armies - which unit is which, what all the figure castings are (including known conversions), where they came from, who painted them - all that. I get a lot of value out of that, but one surprising omission is the date when they arrived - I wish I had thought of recording that, but I could probably reconstruct most of that information if I were pressed - at least approximately. Have you ever been approximately pressed, by the way? - no matter.

...everything else is in boxes - the pink boxes are ECW, the remainder are
the rest of the Peninsular War stuff.

The Catalogue is in a dirty great Word table, with hyperlinks to photographs of all the units. Being a table, though, it doesn't lend itself well to proper statistical analysis. So after I had thought about it for a little while I set about linking a spreadsheet to my Catalogue tables, and - of course - the spreadsheet very readily coughed up the numbers. As is always the case with worthy, obsessive jobs like this, after I had studied the numbers and thought about them, I was at a loss what to do with the information.

One obvious thing to do was to send it to Stryker - that'll teach him - but it also occurred to me that I could post it on the blog too; not so much because I think you'll be interested, or even remotely impressed, but because the blog in some ways is a sort of confessional - forgive me, Father, for I have far too many soldiers - in fact I have now quantified how many I have. If you can give me some pointers towards an official algorithm, Father, I could add a column to my spreadsheet giving the appropriate number of Hail Marys.

Situation as at 11:00, 14th June 2017...

Anyway, I'm pleased I have the thing under better control - well, not under control, maybe, but at least more accurately measured. I feel better for it. Cleaner.

Now I'd better have a look at doing one for the ECW, and all the Napoleonic transport items...

Topic 2: The Plastic Forest

This is really just a fleeting mention - I seem to have accumulated what must be one of the world's largest collections of Merit fir trees - the little plastic jobs for HO railways, out of production since about 1970. I didn't set out to achieve this, but people kept selling them on eBay (I guess railway modellers must be dying off too?). In its way it is a fine thing, and I am increasingly concerned about storing and looking after these little trees, because they are very old and fragile, and the plastic is rotting - they are very like me, in fact. I have a new solution to the storage, which I shall share with you when it is ready. You will be impressed - you may not wish to copy it, but you will be relieved to learn that someone else is as weird as this.

Anyway - more soon. Oh - and, yes, I do know how many fir trees I have, but I'm not saying.

Topic 3: Plonk

I do enjoy a glass of wine now and then. My wife drinks almost no alcohol these days, so opening a bottle of wine means either:

(a) I drink the whole bottle, which is not a great idea, or

(b) I try to recork it and make the bottle last a few days, which - let's be honest here - doesn't work very well - the stuff really doesn't keep, despite all the patent air-pumps and sealing stoppers we have accumulated - or

(c) I can drink some of the bottle, and then pour the remainder down the sink, which is maybe the worst idea of the lot.

Recently, someone jokingly suggested that I should buy wine that I didn't like, so that I wouldn't feel bad about wasting it. As is often the case, there is a germ of commonsense in that daft thought.

What I have been doing for a year or two now is buying a box of wine. You can have a single glass, and it will still be drinkable for a week or two. OK - that's a working solution (the issue of sticking to a single glass is important, but a separate problem). However, on the general subject of wine...

There are some excellent wines available now - I don't know how Brexit might affect that, but at the moment our local supermarket has some splendid wine. I find that I am having to be a bit choosey - this comes down to personal taste, of course, and my taste is no better than anyone else's, but it's me I'm making the choices for. A large proportion of the good wine on sale comes from the sunny countries of the world - Australia, Chile, California, South Africa and so on; it's good stuff, much of it, and its ancestry is from the classic vintners of Old Europe, but it is often too strong for me now. Too much sunshine? I can buy an excellent 3 litre pack of Australian Shiraz for about £15 - super stuff - but too serious, too fiery, too intense - I can't casually sip a glass of this (13.5% alcohol by volume) while reading or watching a film - too much Marmite in the taste, too many headaches.

I find I'm moving down-market a bit. Nothing new - I always used to like French Table Red - Chateau Plonko - vin ordinaire - you can't buy it now, as far as I can tell. No demand, I guess. I prefer simple red wines - Tesco do a good Sicilian red which is not too beefy, I like Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Corbières - things which are soft and friendly.

Quick digression. I was listening to the radio a week or two ago, and there was a chap on from the British wine-growers' association. I might have overlooked that there was such a thing as a British wine industry, but it seems they have been having a tricky year. The mild, wet winter produced brisk budding activity early on, and then the frosts of April did a lot of damage. I made a mental note that there was a British wine industry capable of being damaged, and promptly forgot about it.

Last week, in Tesco, I spotted a box of British wine! Never seen one of those before. It was very cheap, 8% strength and described as "refreshingly fruity". It is a poor life that does not extend to a little research, so I bought a box - I expected little and - as you expected - that's what I got.

The box suggests they have the neck to sell this stuff in bottles, too.

The stuff is awful. It tastes like a cross between Ribena and boot polish, to be honest. I could, I suppose, grin and bear it in a spirit of Good Old Patriotism, but the final straw is it isn't actually British. The box says that it is made from imported grape juice. Good grief. My dad used to produce home-made wine like that years ago, and it was all crap and it all tasted mostly of sulphites. A long and honourable tradition, then, of putting a brave face on things. Personally, I feel I humoured my dad for quite long enough, I want no more of this. I mention this only as a gentle warning - if Brexit requires you to change your drinking habits, don't be tempted to change in this direction, lest you, too, get to rinse out your kitchen drains with it. 

The small print.

Where Have You Been All the Day, My Charming Billy?

Yesterday was Flatpack Day here – I took delivery of a tall, 80cm wide Billy bookcase unit from our trusty Swedish friends at IKEA, and it is now in position in my office, and the job of shifting and re-storing everything I can think of is well under way.

I have even secured it to the wall in the approved H&S manner, so small children may climb up it with impunity (unless I catch them).

I have now moved my soldier box-files from Cupboard No.2 (beyond the door at the end of the office in the photo below) on to the lower shelves of the new unit, as you see, and shifted the wargames terrain boxes from Upstairs Hall Cupboard B into Cupboard No.2 (I hope you're taking notes here), which is much handier, and means that I will no longer be at risk of waking up the entire household when putting away my terrain at 2 am.

That's Billy, in the corner; the white door is Cupboard #2

What is going to happen in Upstairs Hall Cupboard B, then, I hear you ask? It will go back to storing bedding and towels, which is what it was intended for, but that’s probably out of scope for this blog. Maybe.

It’s a fascinating field of study, this constant re-engineering of space to conceal the fact that our armies have become – well, too big, I suppose. Did Warhammer ever do a title on this?

I enjoyed the flatpack job so much I have been thinking of ordering another unit I don’t need, just to build it. The nice thing about IKEA stuff is that it goes together perfectly – everything lines up. No dremel, needle files or pin-vices needed, and no piping around the turnbacks to paint.

In the final picture, you will see the neat fit offered by this size of shelving to A4 box files; grey ones at the bottom are Peninsular War artillery and staff, blue are Peninsular War Spanish and pink (sorry, light red) are ECW. The remainder of the Peninsular troops are still in The Cupboard in the dining room, this being the infamous glazed display bookcase which no-one can see into, since it is fitted with black curtains to keep out the sun…

Avec Mes Sabots – the attraction of magnets

This follows on from the Magnetic Spaniards post from earlier this month. So impressed was I by the sturdiness of wargame units fitted with magnetic sheet (stuck underneath the bases) standing on steel paper (fitted, and painted, on top of the "sabots") that I have immediately set about a whole new project (distraction) to extend this system to my entire Napoleonic collection.

This little sub-project breaks at least 3 well-established rules from Foy’s Book of Wargames Lifemanship for Boys, viz:

• do not change your bases, and especially do not change your basing standard for an existing army – this is the road to heartache and depression
• do not allow any fleeting idea to fire up a project which  diverts time and effort away from something you really wanted to do
• if your collection contains something which you have had for a great many years, think carefully before you throw it out or replace it

However, I have convinced myself that it is worthwhile on all counts, so am going ahead. Thus far, I’ve done all the Nationalist Spanish, and am now about half-way through the French army. To illustrate what is involved, consider this example - I have my line infantry units mounted as 4 bases of 6 figures measuring 50x45mm standing on a 110x110 sabot, which sit well with my 7" hexes. Neat patches of mag sheet, cut to size with scissors, fitted to the existing bases, and a 100x90 footprint patch of steel paper on the sabot, painted in the baseboard/tabletop colour, requires a small investment in materials and time, but greatly simplifies handling both on and off the battlefield.

Naturally, any self-respecting hobby project has to sprout arms and legs, and in this case the add-on task is to replace the tattier specimens of sabot. Most of my troops have been rebased within the last 7 years or so, so the bases are very good, but the sabots are variable - recent ones are good MDF, but the older ones are horrible curly cardboard, and it would be foolish indeed to put steel paper onto these. So I ordered up some custom sizes of laser-cut MDF from the excellent East Riding Miniatures (which arrived within 24 hours, as always) and am taking the opportunity to replace any sub-standard sabots I come across while I am fitting the magnets.

My sabot sizes? I have 4 standard sizes:

Type A   (line infantry)        110 deep  x 110 wide

Type B   (skirmish units)     110 x 90

Type C   (light cavalry)       110 x 160

Type D   (heavy cavalry)    110 x 135

Each of these gives me 5mm spare on either side of the troops’ bases, to make it easier to pick up units by the sabot. There are other odd sizes, but I just cut those myself as required. Why no artillery sabots? – I don’t use sabots for artillery, and all the artillery has already been fitted with magnets in order to store them in box files.

In pricing this little “improvement” project, I am not going to include the cost of the replacement sabots, on the grounds that this is something that needed doing anyway – thus I estimate that the cost of the magnetic materials, including wastage, works out at rather less than £0.75 per unit on average, which seems very reasonable.

Because I promised to do it, I’ve featured a picture of some Sideways Frenchmen formed into line on the fridge door. OK - I've done it now - I do not wish to talk about it again.

Tips and things I’ve learned so far – not much, really:

• you can easily mark the paper side of the steel paper with a pencil, but the mag sheet has to be marked out on the shiny plastic backing sheet, which is resistant to most known forms of writing medium. A very thin Sharpie marking pen does the job, but you have to keep wiping the ruler clean. Holding the ruler still on the slippy sheet is tricky, too, but a steel ruler will attach itself nicely (aha!).
• the scissors get badly gunked up with the adhesive, so it’s necessary to clean up with Sticky Stuff Remover or isopropyl alcohol or similar every couple of hours
• only observed practical downside of sturdily mounting figures on the sabots is that if you catch them by accident they will not tip gently in the traditional forgiving way, so watch out for those bayonets – if you have to wave your arms around while explaining a point of the rules, take care!
• the magnetic sheet is glossy and slippery – if I put magnet-fitted bases on a non-steel-paper sabot, they are even less stable than they were, so this is an all-or-nothing effort 

And, finally, Avec Mes Sabots is the chorus line from an ancient French song, which I seem to have learned in my early childhood. Here you can join in and sing along – it’s through the Square Window, boys and girls.

Magnetic Spaniards - and beyond....?

 

The Sideways Spaniards

Some months ago, I suddenly realised the usefulness of magnetic sheet for storing figures safely. The Cupboard had run out of space, and I decided to rehouse my artillery and support vehicles in A4 box files, lined with steel paper - much like everyone else does, in fact. My units are all based with rigid plywood or MDF, and applying self-adhesive mag sheet to the undersides was a lot easier than I had expected. So I now have 6 boxes full of guns and limbers and pontoon trains and wagons and all that stuff, and the magnets stick so powerfully that on occasion (and it makes me a little faint to think of it) I have shown off by slowly standing the odd box file vertical, so show that the pieces stay firmly attached. I have, I hasten to add, laid them flat again before the applause died away.

I have been very pleased with this exciting new departure (for me - I don't get out much), and, as The Cupboard determinedly continues to shrink, I have come to accept that I need to adopt the same approach for some other units, to free up more space. Next in the queue, I decided, is my Spanish Nationalist army, so I bought smart blue files for them from Tesco, ordered up some mag sheet and steel paper from the most excellent Trevor at Magnetic Displays, and spent an interesting evening preparing the files and applying the mag sheet to the subunit bases. And in the files they go. Excellent.

Now, of course, this requires me to separate the (sub)unit bases from the sabots on which they normally live, and it suddenly became very obvious that if I put a steel paper patch on each sabot, and re-painted them with baseboard green, my newly-magnetic Spaniards would sit very firmly thereupon when they came out of the boxes to fight. So another evening with ruler, pencil and scissors followed, and - by 'Eck - it works!

I was a bit worried that even a thin coat of baseboard paint would weaken the magnetic pull, but it is still fine. I was going to publish a picture of all the units standing on edge on their sabots but I chickened out. It does work, though - trust me – there is a single unit at a near-vertical angle in the photo.

And the point of this further step with the sabots? The point, gentlemen, is that I am a noted dropper of wargame soldiers. It may be the hated varifocals, it may be temporary changes in the Earth's gravitational pull, it is most likely connected with dementia in some form, but I live in constant dread of subunits sliding off their sabots because I have momentarily lost my artificial horizon. As the collection get older and more valuable, and as my own ability to repair or replace them decays, so cruel Nature has me always a little anxious about accidental damage on the battlefield - or on the floor not far from the battlefield. The magnets look like they could be the answer. Certainly I could still drop an entire unit in one go - I haven't thought of a solution for that one other than not playing with them - but with magnetized bases on a steel-paper-coated sabot they are very reassuringly solid.

Downsides? Not much, really - the mag sheet is 0.55mm thick, so the units stand just that much taller, but the bases are a mixture of 2mm and 3mm anyway, so I can't really notice - expecially since I am quite a lot taller than the troops, and tend rather to look down on them (so to speak). This is all so successful that I have now started pondering whether I should treat all the rest of my units the same way. The chaps who are still living in The Cupboard would be much easier to handle safely, and it would be possible to put them in prepared box files (or whatever) if I need to transport them - a facility I have never had before. There is the further problem that I have nowhere to transport them to, but that is a detail, and I might have some friends one day. You never know.

The real thing to think about is the cost and the labour involved. It also occurs to me that I have no idea how permanent the magnetic properties of the sheet are, or - more seriously, perhaps - what is the life expectancy of the self-adhesive coating. It would be a sad thing to invest a lot of time and beer money in converting my entire collection, and then find that the pads all dropped off as the adhesive perished. I could, of course, glue them back in place....

Stop it.

I'll continue to ponder this. There seem to be a lot of advantages, but I'll weigh it up. At present, not yet having worked out the cost, I am gently enthusiastic.

To end with something of a digression, my young son and I have a long-standing private joke about the Sideways People - this stems from a display that used to be in our local IKEA store, which had kitchen tables and desks and similar mounted on the wall, 90 degrees from the vertical, with dishes, cutlery, computers and so on attached to match. Our theory is that the Sideways People come in at night, and live their strange, 90-degrees-out-of-phase lives in IKEA when no-one else is around, though how they could pour milk into the cereal bowls has always been a puzzle. Anyway, my new enthusiasm for magnetic sheet enters into the Sideways People fantasy - in theory, it would be possible to fight a small battle on the fridge door, for example. Not sure I'll rush to try it, but the Sideways People themselves might see this as a further advantage.