More Painting...

 

Been away for a few days but have had time to finish off most of the WW2 troops

2x 25pdrs, 4 Vickers and 4 Boyes Rifle teams.   I still have 2 x quads to finish off.

Also managed to paint a Battlemasters tower for a friend.

After the 2 quads I am probably onto some 25mm Minifigs French Marlburians next.

Putting away unfinished things...

 

I decided this weekend that  I needed to be more disciplined in my approach to painting, so I have spent some time tidying out the Bureau I use for painting and painting projects.

I have filed away anything I won't get to this year or that has stalled and cleared the bureau surface off all paints and detritus.

The painting area will now only have one unit on it and the paints required to paint that unit.  I hope that helps me focus on finishing things a bit more...  I have tended to jump from one project to the next without always finishing stuff off or seeing things through to completion.

I have finished 12 x 25mm Minifigs Colonials today that I am painting for a friend - so it might be working.

Next up on the painting table is 20mm Early War British Boyes ATs, HMGs and 2 x 25pdr guns...

A Bridge of sorts...

 I have been away for a week at a Christian Festival my wife usually attends - I went this year with the caravan to socialise (as I know a lot of people in her church) and get some writing done.

We had fun but came back last Tuesday and on Wednesday both came down with Covid - like a flashback to 2020! I have been pretty ill all week and still have no energy and feel run down.

What I have been able to do is send some files through the 3d Printer.

Four days of running the 3d Printer on and off and I have a Star Trek style bridge...  It is 390mm x 390mm square

This consists of 9 "tiles" which each took between 1h30 and 3h30 to print, plus the middle command section (1h30) and the rails, 10 chairs and the door...

Now I need to work out how to paint it (possibly with an airbrush? or may speed paints ) and I need to produce drop in pictures for the view screen and the 16 other screens...  I'll probably get the ww2 stuff done before I start on painting a test corridor piece.

The design is by lv427-designs who produce a whole range of SF corridors and rooms.

3d Printing and a new toy

 I have been thinking for a while about upgrading my 3d printer.  I bought the Cubicon Style 9 years ago when I wanted to design and print Toy Soldier terrain and vehicle parts in ABS plastic so I could mould them in metal.

The Cubicon was expensive  but worked straight out of the box which meant I could spend time learning the software, rather than rebuilding the printer every time.

Technology has moved on and I have been keeping an eye on Bambu printers as a possible replacement as they have a good reputation and are a lot faster than the Cubicon.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Bambu had a sale on so picked up the Bambu A1 printer for about 20% of what I originally paid for the Cubicon.

The printer is easy to put together (just 10 screws or so to attach the two halves, plus some cables to plug in).

One of the reasons for wanting to upgrade the printer was that I was finding the 150mm cubic bed of the cubicon limiting on what I could print.  There is a lot of very good 3d printable terrain pieces now and I needed a larger printer to be able to print them - the A1 has a 256mm cubic bed.

In particular I have been looking at getting some French houses, etc for my WW2 setup and this enabled me to buy the 3dprintterrain WW2 buildings which I really liked the look of.  For £58 you get a huge number of very well designed buildings - I bought the 80th anniversary Normandy set.

The buildings print much faster than on my other printer - typically 4-5 hours for the main building and 2 hours for the roofs.  I am printing them at 0.2mm quality in Matte grey PLA which gives a good effect and minimises the print lines.

I have started painting them and am pleased with the results so far,

I want to make a number of town/village bases for WW2 games so I can play through the Blitzkreig scenarios in the Rapid Fire scenario book which require a fair number of buildings.  Most of the WW2 building I have are ruins rather than complete buildings.

I am also looking at printing some bits and pieces for my Gangster city (such as water towers for the roof tops and a train carriage to go with the existing train and tender) and some starship corridors and rooms for Star Trek skirmish games.

More progress on Dendermonde

 

Finally finished texturing and painting the main elements of the Dendermonde defenses.  Still need to finish off the Gatehouse but getting there.

Next up is working out exactly how I am going to do the grass on the Glacis and designing and cutting the causeway from the gate to the glacis via the demi-lune.

Very rough setup to see how it looks...

 

 

Mortimer's Cross with Flower of Chivalry

 

Another Wednesday, another game.  This time we played a refight of Mortimer's Cross during the War of the Roses using the Flower of Chivalry Rules from the Canadian Wargames Group.

Setup was a 4' x 4' table with the Yorkist deploying first along the old Roman road and the Lancastrians deploying on the ridge on the other side of Mortimer's Cross.

The game was very enjoyable and we both remembered how much we like these rules and what a good and realistic WOTR game they give.

The game was very close, with the Lancastrians (me) just breaking the Yorkist morale and taking Mortimer's Cross with 3 of my own Army morale remaining.

28mm figures based on 60mm square bases.

 

 

Defence of the Ypres-Comine Canals 1940

 

Played a 20mm Rapid Fire game at the club last week.

I used the excellent Blitzkrieg scenario and forces books and ran the defence of the Ypres-Comine canal scenario.  It has 3 battalions of germans with supports attacking 2.5 battalions of British who are heavily outnumbered.  Its a nice scenario to use as an intro as it has only infantry + support weapons and off table artillery, no tanks involved.

The British were eventually over-run, with the Seaforth highlanders falling back before routing, the Fusiliers also routed leaving a weak 2nd Northumberland to try and defend the canal.  Some good german artillery made short work of them and the game was over - pretty much an historical result.

The British artillery was quite poor (my die rolling as usual) and I didn't manage to make as much use of my MG teams as I hoped.

Great game and the other two players who hadn't used Rapid Fire reloaded were impressed by the ease of the rules.