Not a competition, no prizes, but I'd welcome opinions on this chap, if anyone has seen one such before.
In a parcel of figures I was very kindly sent recently, there were a few of these - 20mm, he may be a Napoleonic Spanish cavalryman - double breasted jacket, lapels, he has a carbine hanging at his side, a braided pigtail, and the equipment on his back appears to be a canvas haversack. There is a simple sabretache. I suppose he could be French heavy cavalry from the Revolutionary period.
Sorry my montage photo is not better. The boots have a touch of Hinton Hunt about them, but the face is somehow familiar - I had thoughts of early Warrior, but as far as I know Warrior cavalry always had saddlery attached to the rider. So - just out of interest - I would be grateful for any clues.
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Subsequent Edit (1st July): thanks very much for comments - Old John is correct - the figure is Hinton Hunt BN206 - the British Heavy Dragoon 1801-11 - with his plume removed. I'm not sure if the buttons I can see on the upper right lapel have been added as well
Stripping time again. I recently applied
matt varnish and a lot of touch-up paint to a host of very shiny ECW troops I
bought on eBay, and generated almost all of what I need to pursue the
adventures of the Marquis of Montrose. Good. Thumbs up.
As with all such bulk purchases, I am left
with a pile of figures which failed inspection – the original painting is too
awful, they need too much rework, the proportion of cat hairs to varnish
offends, they are no use for what I need, whatever. Certainly I have the
makings of a couple of decent regiments of horse and a few useful generals, but
– alas – I’m going to have to strip these to get the best of them.
The gloss varnish they are finished in –
apart from the animal impurities - is far too thick, yellowing, smells dreadful
(no, really) and is a source of scientific puzzlement to me. What is it? Why
would anyone apply it to model soldiers? Just looking at it, I found the
whispered words BLEACH PROOF came
into my mind from somewhere.
Now, as discussed here before on numerous
occasions, I have mixed experience with using thick household bleach for
stripping soldiers. I would like it to work, it is relatively inoffensive
compared with the alternatives, it is easy to use, you can see what you’re
doing (at least a bit), it is only slightly dangerous and you can safely flush
it down your indoor drains. The alternatives, in these parts, really come down
to just one thing – Nitromors – which certainly strips paint but can also remove
your hands and fails pretty much all the criteria mentioned above as plus
points for bleach. I once had the experience of being in a room with a mixture
of Nitromors and hot water, and have promised my lungs and my eyeballs I shall
not do it again. Also – in this particular instance – many of the figures which
require stripping are from Tumbling Dice, which means separate, glued-on heads
and weapons, and Nitromors will also strip out the glue. I can think of
absolutely nothing less enchanting than sifting through the toxic sludge at the
bottom of a bean can containing a Nitromors project, looking for the correct
number of missing 20mm scale heads and pistols.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the garage...
So bleach would be a nice alternative if it
works, and I’d even saved up some cheeky little, transparent chocolate mousse
pots which are ideal for keeping an eye on stripping progress with bleach jobs,
but in my heart I knew it wasn’t going to work. The Bold Stryker is a great
champion of bleach for this sort of work, but I am beginning to suspect it is
partly a question of faith. I have had some good experiences with bleach, and some
disappointments, and at the start of each new attempt (I have to confess) I
find that I am not as optimistic as I would like.
Since I had a plentiful supply of bleach,
the cheeky pots and lots of suitable test samples, I decided to try one out. Definitely
the right thing to do. The chap at the top of this post is a Tumbling Dice
Covenanter of some sort, and he spent almost 40 hours in bleach – well above
the health warning in Stryker’s guidelines. While he was in the bleach, there
was no evidence that the varnish was suffering at all – he looked the same as
when he started. When I took him out and rinsed and dried him, I’m not so sure.
The varnish is still there, but it is a lot less shiny, his hat has faded a
bit, but some interesting cracks have appeared in the paintwork.
Hmmm.
The alloy hasn’t started discolouring, or
turning into anything undesirable. Do I think that another soaking in the
bleach would result in some better progress? Not sure. I could try it,
certainly.
After all, anything is better than
Nitromors. In this case, with the glued-on head problem, simply ditching the
remaining figures and – if necessary – buying new ones might be a sad but wise
alternative to Nitromors. I guess I should try another bleach session – I could
leave him in for an open-ended trial – the worst that could happen is that I
write off a scrap figure, which is a trifling matter indeed.
It is a question of faith – I am beginning
to see that. I am, I believe, scared of proving to myself, once and for all,
that there is no future in using bleach, and my confidence will suffer. It is
difficult.
While I ponder the matter, the picture
at the top is of the most germ-free toy soldier you will ever see.
Not really another rant, just something which has
cropped up which seems daft enough to warrant a Donkey Award. I’ll keep it
short and to the point. I shall avoid mentioning the fact that the explosion of
unsecured, unrepayable personal debt which caused so much damage to Western
economies leading up to 2008 (and which hurt everyone, not just those who had those debts) was largely promoted by the credit card companies,
who somehow seem to have escaped the public outrage and recrimination which has hit the banks (for example). I am all in favour of public outrage,
and I have never understood how they were missed, though of course I am not
going to mention it.
Some years ago I was one of a number of
people who were scammed by having credit card details cloned by a tweaked card-reading
device. I now know exactly where and when it happened. The perpetrators were, I
understand, a Sri Lankan revolutionary organization who had managed to gain a
presence in the franchise for Shell petrol stations in the UK. However it was
done, I suddenly found that I had purchased a surprising number of one-way
flights to Singapore, as a customer of Dragon Airlines. My credit card company’s
fraud people were very good, and my loss was refunded and my card was changed,
all very quickly. I was lucky. Since then, of course, chip and PIN technology
has become much more sophisticated, and we like to think that electronic
shopping is more secure than it was, but one lasting result of the Dragon
Airlines episode is that I maintain a small Mastercard account alongside my
main Visa one, and this Mastercard is intended just for transactions on the
Internet, or via the telephone to merchants I do not know. It specifically has
a small credit limit, to minimise the damage if there is a security failure.
Did any passengers buy their own tickets…?
This was identified as a good idea in
post-Dragon discussions with the card suppliers themselves. It is disappointing,
therefore, that they keep writing to me to tell me that they are going to do me
the big favour of increasing this small security limit. Presumably I am not
getting into enough debt.
This week I got such a letter, telling me
that my credit limit on the Mastercard will be automatically increased from
£500 to £2000 at the end of July. It also tells me, of course, how I may go
about telling them not to do this, but this is now the fifth time we have gone
through this rigmarole, and I don’t appreciate it.
I phoned the supplied 0800 number this
morning, and spoke to a very nice, helpful chap in India. After we had
discussed my wish to keep the headroom on the Mastercard low, and the reasons
for this, he cancelled the increase, and (for the fifth time now) assured me that
my account is now coded so that I will not get automatic increases in the
future. We’ll see, but that's OK so far. He also explained that it might take up to 8 weeks for these
changes to take effect on the system, which, of course would take us well past the
end of July.
BONG!! This is the 12-month waiting-list
for the pre-natal clinic all over again. I believe we have managed to sort it out, and it’s
not my Indian friend’s fault anyway, but you can bet that I will be checking my
Mastercard account online around the end of July.
Be very afraid - you have not yet seen hacks & viruses
Before we ended our conversation, I was
asked would I like to obtain the new smartphone app to enable instant
Mastercard shopping (so that I will not be a source of embarrassment to my
friends by not having it).
No – I don’t want it. Thanks. If they have
a long think about it, they might just come up with some reasons why. Too much enthusiasm, not enough common sense.
Yesterday I was pleased to welcome back the two battalions of the Regimiento La Reina from their trip to be painted by the excellent Lee. Not only that, but I now also have some mounted colonels painted up, including the new mounted command figures for the existing Regimiento Africa.
After a short frenzy of varnishing and basing, here are the two regiments on parade. At present they look a little odd since they have uncut flagpoles - the flags and finials are still to come, but I hope you will see that my little 1809 army is beginning to take shape. The Reina boys have purple facings here, Africa black. Figures are NapoleoN, apart from the hat-waving colonel, who is a Falcata casting, and the other mounted officers, which are conversions of my own.
Next up will probably be Irlanda, in blue and yellow, and maybe some light infantry.
A few days ago, I got involved in that most
perennial of lowbrow pub debates, one whose pointlessness does not make it any
less enjoyable – the weighty question of Which
Are the All-Time Great Guitar Solos?
On this occasion my companions were practising
musicians (and I use the term “practising” deliberately), but it does not make
a lot of difference, because the discussion is always pushed down the same
lines by a couple of recognised (though unspoken) sub-clauses:
The
solo must be from a (vocal) popular song – and one that everyone knows – none
of your alternative stuff – no Brazilians, for example…
OTT
categories such as Heavy Metal are normally excluded (or at least subject to drug
tests)
The
whole thing is so slanted by your age, what you like and everything else that
it usually mutates into “What Are Generally
Recognised as the All-Time Great Guitar Solos?” – i.e. it’s everyone else
on trial here, not me.
As always, we came up with the standard
answers:
Probably the solo from “Hotel California”
Probably the solo from Steely Dan’s
“Reelin’ in the Years”
Probably the solo from that Carpenters’
record that we can’t remember, because we wouldn’t admit to listening to the
Carpenters anyway
Probably the solo from Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’
All Over”, because it’s instantly recognizable
Probably the instrumental sections from Led
Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (which can still get you thrown out of most of
the music shops I know)
Probably Dr Brian May’s solo on Queen’s “Bohemian
Rhapsody” (which is getting very close to OTT)
Probably the duet solo from “The Boys Are
Back in Town”, though a number of other Thin Lizzy records must be up there too
…and a lot more of the same – supply your
own list (fun this, isn’t it?).
It’s very easy to get sidetracked into
artists one particularly likes, which is too close to Your Specialist Subject for general comfort, so we have to avoid that
(in my case, it would involve people like Robben Ford and Toninho Horta,
which would get me blank looks all round). I did, however, put forward a record
which I don’t think is in any way a classic, and it certainly wasn’t a hit, and
it’s not by a big-name singer, and overall I don’t especially like it (which
feels as though all this underselling should make it OK) – it’s Dave Berry’s “My
Baby Left Me” from early 1964.
Who?
A quick word on Dave Berry – when I was a
lad, he had a band called The Cruisers, who were known as the second best band
in Sheffield (I think Joe Cocker’s band was regarded as the best), and I once saw
them at the Cavern in Liverpool, where, I have to say, I thought they were fairly
average. Berry is still around, and still performing, so all the best to him,
and I shall be careful what I say (in case he comes to get me), but my view on
his band seems to have been shared by the people at Decca Records, because
after contributing a couple of so-so B-sides the Cruisers no longer appeared on
Dave Berry’s recordings, and instead Decca used some of the best session
players in the country at the time (which is a whole other subject). My Baby Left Me is short, an
unspectacular cover of Presley’s record, but it includes a little gem of a solo
from Jimmy Page, no less, who was 19 at the time it was recorded (swine).
By the standards of the day, this was how
to do it – say what you’ve got to say in one chorus – first take, if you please
– then pack up your stuff and clear out – the studio’s booked for someone else
after 3pm.
It still doesn’t get into anyone else’s
list, but if you haven’t heard it, here it is.
In a post dating from December 2010, I showed a replacement unit I had acquired, and discussed my concept of Creeping Elegance in wargames armies - the replacing or modifying of odd figures or complete units if they do not please me for some reason or other (even if the reason may seem eccentric or otherwise unreasonable). The occasion, back in 2010, was the recruitment of enough 20mm Miniature Figurines castings to make a battalion of the Brunswick-Oels Jaegers, to replace a unit of Kennington Brunswickers (which, in turn, I had obtained to replace a unit of elephantine modern Minifigs Brunswickers, and so on…). The point of the 2010 replacement was that the MF20 figures are correctly dressed in the long Polrock coat, appropriate to the Peninsular War, whereas the Kenningtons were in short jackets, being intended to represent the Waterloo-period Leibregiment. The tidy-minded reader will understand this, I think...
The only flaw in the new unit was that I couldn't get a completely suitable drummer, so the Kennington drummer stayed on, and has in fact done stout service in subsequent campaigns.
The problem is that the Minifigs 20mm catalogue did not include a Brunswick drummer, for some reason - the range of available infantry for the Black Horde was:
BrN 1 Infantryman on Guard
BrN 2 Infantryman Advancing
BrN 3 Infantryman Firing
BrN 4 Infantry Officer
of which you can see specimens of BrN 2 to 4 in the picture above. The earliest near-match which is suitable is from Minfigs' subsequent S-Range, BrN 6s, and I've been on the lookout for one of these since then.
Well, I got one. Considering the current big push to get a big backlog of limbers and siege paraphernalia painted up, fiddling around with the (cosmetic) upgrade of a single 40-year-old drummer may seem a bit small-time, but such little steps bring satisfaction out of all proportion to their cost or size, especially after such a long-winded hunt. Anyway, here they are, with new drummer inserted, and they are probably as happy as I am about it.
I also included a converted S-Range officer on the right of the picture - if it matters, he is probably Hauptmann Friedrich von Doernberg, who served on General Von Bernewitz's brigade staff in 1812 - he is wearing a rather old-fashioned silver sash, and the distinctive undress cap. The battalion does not carry any colours, because the Brunswickers didn't in the Peninsula, and because they are in any case classified as British light infantry, and my light infantry units are very particular about keeping their colours safe in Lisbon.
More on the Ongoing Background Artillery
Project (OBAP)
I’m working away to get a bit more progress
on my dreadful backlog of Napoleonic limbers -especially those of the French and their allies – which always nags away
at me, and takes up space in the project boxes which could be used for
something more pleasing.
Having said which, the limbers and other
artillery and logistical vehicles are pleasing enough when they do get
completed, but since they are not a priority (i.e. my rules mostly don’t
strictly require them to be present) this is a very rare event indeed.
This last week I’ve been preparing some
French limber teams for painting. Some of these castings are very small "25mm" from Jack Scruby
Miniatures (these days, that means Historifigs), and their artillery horses are
strange objects – I rather like them, not least because for many years they
were really all you could get in metal 1/72-ish apart from vintage Hinton Hunt
(which got prohibitively expensive) and Kennington (whose artillery horse is
one of their “Pantomime” jobs, with short shins and an odd gait).
Your hoof-bone's connected to your knee-bone
Note the cunningly twisted draught lines, to simplify casting
Working with the Scruby horse is a bit of a
challenge – the master is sculpted with the left front hoof attached to the
right knee, and the draught lines twisted through a surprising angle and
attached to the tail and the right rear leg – all in the interests of
simplifying the mould lines. In its starting configuration the horse does not
look very promising, but a bit of fiddling and sawing and twisting and it sort
of works. This is not made any easier by Historifigs’ insistence on using an
unusually hard, brittle alloy which neither bends nor files very easily, and is
known to snap in moments of stress.
The four pairs and drivers nearest the camera are Scrubies - my lacerated fingers will recover, please don't send flowers
Some I prepared earlier - some French caissons from my last big push on the OBAP - as always with Scruby 25mm, they paint up better than you think they are going to
I’ve managed to produce another 4 pairs of Scruby
horses with drivers this time, and it took me some time to achieve this. They
should start getting painted next week. Next batch of painting is (I think) 4
British limber horse pairs (Lamming), 8 French (4 Scruby and 4 of the lovely,
but expensive, Art Miniaturen), complete with limbers and cannon (mostly
Hinchliffe 20, but some of the guns are of obscure origin – they may be Rose
with wheel swaps) and a bunch of Peninsular, stovepipe-hatted Royal Artillery
gunners for the Allied siege train (these are NapoleoN castings, but may also include
some Kenningtons if SHQ send me some in time).
The gunners are for a series of 3 batteries
of 10” howitzers – which is far more than the real Royal Artillery had
available in the Peninsular War, but they look good.
Anyway, more of all this sometime in the future.
This morning’s excitement is merely a glimpse of the Chinese puzzle which is
the Scruby artillery horse. A casting which was designed to be converted before
it could be used.
