Catching Up with the Mainstream

Box 1 of the French Artillery - the two armies require six such boxes

Sometimes I surprise myself with my own stupidity. Of course, I realise that everyone in the known universe uses magnetic basing materials to transport their wargames figures, but somehow this particular technological advance has evaded me. Partly because my soldiers live in a big static cupboard, but mostly because I never take them anywhere - except when I move house, of course.

I bought in some mag sheets a couple of years ago as part of a fleetingly brilliant idea connected with deployable skirmishers, but the idea proved to be a poor one. Recent army expansions and my big push to get more limbers completed have meant that The Cupboard is now officially full, and some reorganisation is needed. With thanks to all who reassured me and offered advice on the subject, I have now fitted out half a dozen A4 box files with steel paper and fitted mag sheet to the bases of my artillery, engineering and wheeled impedimenta, and am delighted with the results. Everything cosy and secure.

Allosaurus makes a discovery

I am a little shamefaced that it took so long for me to get to this point, but here I am. Yes - I know that everyone uses this stuff all the time, but there's an act of faith required when it comes to risking precious figures and guns - my experience has been that old Sir Isaac Newton will get you in the end, especially if you are as clumsy as I am. Anyway, Allosaurus has discovered that it is no longer necessary to kill something everyday to stay alive - you just go to the supermarket like everyone else.

My thanks to Trevor Holland at Coritani for helpful, quick service and supplying me with the mag sheets. Excellent.

Hooptedoodle #36 - LG Optimus

A propos of nothing at all - clip of the LG Optimus store-front light show in Berlin. If you haven't seen it before, just watch, preferably in full screen view....

Portuguese Artillery

Another new vehicle takes its place in the cupboard. This is a Portuguese howitzer on the march, circa 1811. Mules are by Jacklex, limber is Lamming, the gun is (I think) S-Range Minifigs, and the driver is from Kennington.

The British caisson which is officially next in the queue is on hold while I sort out my stock of horses; it is painted but awaiting final assembly while I put together a sensibly-scaled team.

This morning I finally lost patience with my collection of brushes, and weeded out the ones I don't use any more. I've never understood paintbrushes. In the days of Humbrol, I used to wash them out in Polyclens and similar - I realise I was supposed to use an exotic patent thinner, or turpentine, but neither of these ever seemed to work properly. Polyclens was very like using battery acid to wash your brushes, and I just got into the habit of replacing them frequently. Mostly I used cheap, short-handled brushes from the model shop - sometimes Humbrol's own brand, sometimes unnamed products at half the price, which may well have come from the same factory. Maybe even from the same cat...

In these enlightened days of acrylics, the whole operation is much more like watercolour, and - possibly incorrectly - I have developed the idea that I should pay the extra and obtain good brushes - even buying the posh stuff from my local art shop. The results have not been brilliant. At any given moment, I probably have about 2 dozen brushes in total, of which about one quarter will currently be behaving nicely. I tend to have a few brushes - a couple of size 0's and some larger ones - which are producing a decent point today. I try to look after them correctly, periodically curing them in hot water and lipping the points like a good chap, but it is a haphazard regime. This morning my favourite lining brush decided to start misbehaving, and it is almost like losing a close friend - very disconcerting.

I don't think I have ever noticed a reliable correlation between the marketed "quality" of a brush and its performance. Top of the range sables from the art shop often have a mind of their own as soon as they get wet, while I have had years of good service from the occasional 2nd quality cheapo from Modelworld.

Biggest disappointment of the lot was a load of unused squirrel brushes which we found amongst my late father's painting paraphenalia (he was a very capable amateur watercolourist, and only ever bought the best of everything) - admittedly they must have been 20 years old, but they disintegrated into dust as soon as they were touched, so maybe squirrel brushes have a definite shelf life. Or maybe this batch came from squirrels which suffered from mange.

Things with Wheels

Here are the first two completed vehicles from the current surge of activity.

The ox cart, previously photographed in bits, now complete - S-Range Minifigs with Hinton Hunt driver. I was going to caption this picture Moo!, since my son and I, both being silly, always shout this whenever we see cattle, or even pictures of cattle, but it occurs to me that in this case the noise of the animals would be drowned out by the screech of the wooden axles.

More S-Range, with a driver recruited from the very last of the spare NapoleoN infantry fusiliers. Jean-Marie appears to be wondering how those two little horses can pull that dirty big pontoon cart. Well, they can - so there you have it. And not only that, but his uniform is correct as well (according to my consultancy support team of Ray Roussel, De Vries and Knoetel & Elting). Thank you, chaps.

My next two efforts will be a Portuguese howitzer and limber, pulled by mules (see Alexander Dickson, vol.2, page ........), which should be fun, plus a British caisson. One small piece of bad news for the caisson is that the Lamming draught horses I was going to use seem to be a bit big. Well, maybe they're not strictly too big, but they make all the other horses look small, which is the same thing. Rethink required - by the way, if anyone has spares of the old S-Range or Alberken or Minifig 20mm artillery horses like the ones shown attached to the pontoon, please just let me know - I can use any number of these.

One final discovery today is that my wizard wheeze of putting steel paper on the underside of the bases of the carts and magnetic material on the floor of a box file to hold them firmly does not look promising. The carts are too heavy. I may as well save the expense and not bother with the magnetic sheet. Curses. Back to the laboratory.

Drivers' Uniforms - any ideas?

True to my word, I am busily assembling and painting carts and caissons and suchlike - not very many of them, it is true, but by my normal standards 2 or 3 is a rush. This morning's effort is a French pontoon wagon, and I find that I am unsure how to paint the driver. This driver is on foot, so he could even be an actual pontonnier or engineering chap helping out by steering the horses.

I think class distinction would insist that the driver is, in fact, a specialist driver, so I am down to a shortlist of 3 possibilities, thus:

(1) pontoons are Engineering, which comes under the Artillery, so he can be an artillery driver, with grey-blue coat, faced dark blue.

(2) no they aren't - Engineering is a distinct department, and I believe that Engineering drivers wore pale grey faced black.

(3) or he could just be a general transport driver - grey-blue faced chestnut brown - this is my least favoured option, since I think these fellows really drove supply wagons and similar, and would not be allowed to go near anything as technical as a pontoon.

One of these? - something else? I'd welcome some guidance on this - left to myself, I think I'd go for (2) above, but I really don't know.

Qualiticast - Size Comparison

I find myself a bit hot-&-cold on the subject of Qualiticast. Sometimes I am very enthusiastic, then I'm not so sure. No doubt about the lovely sculpting or the casting (unsurpassed in 20mm, in my experience) - the figures are little treasures, but the sizes can be a problem for me. Some figures I have obtained - especially cavalry - are a bit small to match my armies. In particular, the hats on some examples are small, and this is always a favourite hobbyhorse of mine when it comes to judging size compatibility. At other times they are perfect for my (23-24mm man-size) armies, and I am left none the wiser.

Recently I was so impressed by a load of Qualiticast British riflemen that I was moved to add a 3rd battalion of the 95th to my British army. This is certainly 1, and possibly 2 battalions more than I ever intended to have. The Qualiticast boys will form a battalion of their own because, though they will be fine alongside Higgins and Hinton Hunt figures in adjacent units, the Rifles figures are just a bit small to mix completely comfortably with other brands within the same unit.

On the other hand, the "Qually" (invent your own jargon) Spanish guerillas I have are an excellent match for my other troops - no problem at all. The mystery lingers.

Today I received a couple of Qualiticast French light infantry command figures via eBay (which, you may recall, I do not do any more), and I've provided a side-by-side comparison scan with a Les Higgins figure in the middle. Perfect - they will mix without any problems, and will accordingly go to the painter so mixed.

I am obviously happy about this, and am left to accept that figures will have to be judged individually. As I have said before, real armies contained big men and small men, but the big men were not equipped with bigger hats or longer muskets!

A Time for Transport

What follows is not in any way a suggestion as to how anyone else should organise the building of a wargames army - far from it - it might be an example of how not to go about it. This is simply a brief illustration of how I have done it myself. I could no doubt have done it better, or in ways which I would have found easier.

I have a number of boxes in which I keep my figures for painting. To the casual observer it may look like chaos, but there is a kind of mad system at work. At the very bottom of the food chain, heaps of spares and things-which-might-come-in-useful are just bagged into approximately generic lots ("Scruby horses", "Broken Higgins for Heads" etc) and kept in shoe boxes somewhere up on the top shelf in my den/office. Things which have been sorted into potential units go into small, labelled plastic freezer-packs - "Garde de Paris - need colonel" etc. These packs live in a couple of boxes of the sort which used to hold bulk copier paper, and these are labelled, respectively, "Skirmishers, Command, Infantry & Odd Bits" and "Artillery & Cavalry", and kept on a lower shelf.

These last two are the boxes which used to cause me some stress. The bags on the top shelf were so informal that I had only an approximate idea what was in there - rootling through them from time to time was quite an adventure. By the time stuff was sorted into the freezer packs I could see exactly how much I had still to paint - exactly which units would have been fighting on the tabletop if it were not for my awful laziness. As my liking for painting complete units tailed off, and especially at times when I was tired or under pressure elsewhere, this bit of the hobby began to irk me quite seriously!

Since then I have discovered the advantages of contracting out the paintwork to professionals, and I now happily maintain a final box, which is "Projects in Hand", where units get their final fettling before being shipped off for painting. I do, of course, still do a fair amount of painting myself, but these days I pick and choose what I am going to do - a special general with a silly hat and a big nose is fun, 22 identical fusiliers is less so. A lot of this is down to my ageing eyeballs.

I'd rather not examine just why or when the lead mountain stopped being a hobby and become something of a threat - it probably had a lot to do with what was going on in my life at various times - it may even have something to do with noticing that I was getting older faster than I was painting, and that I probably would never get to finish my planned armies. Who can say? - whatever, it's OK now. Even if the Grand Plan keeps changing and sprouting heads, I am no longer afraid! I can go into the office cupboard without flinching...

I am almost getting to the point of this post. The contents of the "Artillery & Cavalry" box have gradually evolved. Because fighting units have always had priority for precious painting time, things like limbers and ammunition carts have kept falling back down the queue. There was a potential worsening of this situation with the arrival of the Commands & Colors rules, since limbers are not really needed. Well, I've made a decision - last night I sat down and worked through that box, and actually counted how many horses and drivers I am short of for a full complement of limbers, and labelled up the boxes. There will be a lot of limbers, also some caissons, a couple of pontoon wagons, some supply carts (mostly ox-drawn) and a mule train. There is also a general's carriage. The intention - and it has survived to this morning, so it might be serious - is that, while the production of infantry units and so on continues, it is time to get working on the vehicles.

There's some excellent raw material in the freezer packs - limbers from the exquisite old Hinchliffe 20mm range and from Lamming, Lamming caissons, S-Range Minifigs wagons and carts, oxen and mules by Jacklex, and horses by all sorts of people, but all vintage stuff. I also have a number of boxes of Italeri, HaT and Zvezda equipment, all of which is certainly very good, but my intention is to use metal as far as possible - exclusively if I can. Shortage of drivers is problematic - a fair amount of conversion work will be needed, and some people are going to be quite surprised to find themselves in the Corps of Transport after all this time. For reasons of space and stinginess, I use 2-horse teams for foot artillery and all wagons - normally with a driver on foot. I find that a mounted driver on a 2-horse team looks a little odd, and draws attention to the unrealistic number of horses. My horse artillery have 4-horse teams and mounted drivers. Such limbers as do already exist in finished form use Hinton Hunt horses and Hinchliffe equipment, so the pedigree is good thus far.

My standard base size for foot artillery teams on the march is 45mm x 110mm including the gun. The horse artillery base size isn't fixed yet, but I'd like to keep it as small as possible. The guns themselves require a decision. I've always assumed that I should keep the cannons loose, so they can be deployed with the gun crews for action as required. This has a pleasing, Old School feel about it - actually bringing the guns into action. There are two reasons why this is not a great idea:

(1) My artillery batteries have 2 gun crews, but only a single representative limber

(2) However hard I try to remember to keep everything horizontal, the loose-mounted guns always finish up falling on the floor, which is bad all round.

Thus - since I have enough guns to do it - my current idea is that I'll glue cannons permanently into position behind the limbers. I can use some of the cannon which I don't like as much (or which are a bit flimsy) for this job - Rose, Hinton Hunt, the odd Kennington etc - and concentate the Hinchliffe and NapoleoN equipment for the gun crews. Commands & Colors rules have batteries with a strength of 3 "blocks" (sub-units), so I hope to be able eventually to use a standard unit of 2 deployed guns + 1 limber as my 3 "blocks".

How to get them painted? I think I might quite enjoy painting wagons and so on, but lots of draught horses sounds like a job for a painter. Some of the limbers start life as a small cloud of bits, so some assembly is necessary before painting. My first thought on this was to assemble complete units, mount them on MDF bases and send them off for painting. I've gone off this idea a bit because the inner sides of the horses would be hard to paint well without the involvement of trained fleas, and because fully assembled units would be heavy and fragile in the post. I think that shipping out packs of unattached horses for painting and building up the units when they come back would be better. I have come to believe that almost anything is possible, using superglue for component assembly, PVA for gluing onto bases, and touch-up and copious matt acrylic varnish to cover up the proverbial multitude of sins.

I'm not sure how quickly this will progress, but at least I now know my enemy - I have counted the horses and drivers...   If I pick away at this, and do limbers and transport vehicles as opportunity arises, I can keep it moving without holding anything up - the battles don't actually need limbers. Which, now I come to think of it, is exactly the sort of thinking that got me to my present position.