Out and About

Well there is no painting or anything tonight, i had a nice hike looking for Neolithic Archaeology today… you can read about it here…Neolithic Landscape

Gaming tomorrow night, but I may have time to get some more bits and bobs done.

I have got some ideas for making 2mm grape vines to go along with my Romanesque buildings. I might have a play in a minute and see how the idea works. They will not, however, look like this….

Bits and Bobs…

Today I managed go get some more slicing and printing done. More Gauls have been added to the box. I also managed to shrink my 6mm Italian buildings down to fit the 2mm troops…

Here they are next to their larger cousins. I put a 2mm elephant in the foreground.

I am also printing more 2mm troops. This time with an oval shield.

I had a bit of a problem with a couple of the last 10mm buildings. The two on the left warped… probably a support failure.

Today I had to sort out the header tank for the septic tank. Luckily it wasn’t as bad as last time.

Tomorrow we are going up Ronas Hill… Shetland’s largest. We are off to look at a stone axe ‘factory’

Mind blowing fact… well it us to me… Iceland (the country, not the shop) is closer to Shetland than Yorkshire and Faroe is closer than Aberdeen…

Nelly and the Elephants

Tonight I thoughti would crack on with the elephants. I managed to get them finished and I think they are rather cute…

This is them on an 80×40 base…here’s a different view of them…

If I base them on this size thenI am going to have light infantry in amongst them too. This wil stop the pesky Velites from scaring my pachyderms. These aren’t glued down yet, they are merely placed for effect. I have another eight without the howdah that aren’t in the photo.

Having a Night Off

Well… it is sort of a night off… I haven’t  painted anything, but I did get some more slicing done on Carl’s 10mm buildings…

Because of their height there is a 6 hour print time.

I have also started looking for hex maps of the Punic Wars… there is a Strategy and Tactics version thT may be of use… I will have to have a look and see what else I can find.

So I am going forcan early night tonight and will take a book to bed with me….

Painting 2mm Romans and a New Light

Today my new painting light came, my new old one was always a bit too far away frommthe desk top so after watching Luke over at Geek Gaming talking about a one he got then I thought I would give it a punt.

As you can tell by this awesome photo a black,light against a dark background wasn’t exactly a great idea. You can however see the effect of the lighton the work surface. The light comes with three light settings that are dimmable. These are warm, daylight and white. As it is an LED light it runs from a USB plug. This is the one I went for…New light . Interestingly enough it has gone up by £6 since I bought mine less than a week ago.

I used it this evening to get various bits and pieces of 2mm painted up…

Bottom left are the elephants, with chariots to the right. In the back are a mix of Roman infantry and various types of cavalry.

I also got a pile more celts and Romans printed and cured. I also sprayed yesterday’s Romans white ready for painting. The 10mm houses are drying off, but they did come out really well…

To save on resin, I printed these hollow and remembered to put a big drain hole in the bottom. I have another few to do. Thee are 130% larger than the original stl.

I eventually got my Irregular Miniatures order in… it was a right sod as the PayPal bit kept falling over. So hopefully very soon there will be a heavy thud on the doormat.

2mm and a 6mm Order

Today has been ‘one of those days’ work wise so I wasn’t really jn the mood to do much, but I did print and cure some more 2mm miniatures. I then got the Roman infantry put onto a painting support…I say Roman, but they will, do for other troops too.

I also did some slicing of some 10mm buildings for my mate Carl and then I set about compiling our Irregular miniatures order. This took ages as the PayPal app part of it kept spitting the dummy and not letting me add anything more. I got to the end only to find that PayPal wanted a code and it went to my wife’s phone and … you guessed it…she was asleep. I will have to press confirm tomorrow.

I am actually having an earlyish night… till’ tomorrow peeps…

2mm and 6mm

Today I got some more paint on my larger 2mm Hill Fort. I also got some paint on the legion sized base as a test run for Strength and Honour when it comes out…

Now I did purchase some new rules to try out. These are by Mini Wars TV and are called Age of Hannibal…

Joe and I had a look at them yesterday and we think they will work for our 2mm forces. We are going to base the miniatures on 30×40 mdf bases.

We are almost ready to make a start on the 6mm Italian Wars forces. We are just finalising our lists then an order will go into Irregular.

I was having a mooch in a box under the bed and I came across this lot…

It’s a pile of 6mm Irregular stuff in the background and some H&R WW2 stuff in the foreground.

The Battle of Al Khali

Tonight we returned to the Sudan for another battle between the Ansar and Anglo Egyptian forces. It did turnout to be a bit of a one sided affair.

We organised our forces, I took some naval ratings, Egyptians and Sudanese, with a Gatling. Joe went for the the Ansar. I was lucky with my command values, but not so with tne officer attributes, having one drunk, one cad, one short sighted chap, a brave one and the general’s favourite nephew . The naval ratings were led by the cad, and the Sudanese by the nephew…

So from left to right some really useless Egyptians who were both poor shots and unenthusiastic. Next are some okay ones, but their officer was short sightedness couldn’t shoot beyond close range, we then have the Gatling gun led by a brave chap and finally the naval ratings and the Sudanese.

In the scenario Joe was expected to defend the town, and therefore had to drop his points to 18.

My subterfuge was to put the useless troops as far away from the fighting as possible…it worked as their dice rolls were impeccable and as I was rolling 8 plus on all of my dice the fact they were useless wasn’t obvious. The force steam rollered forwards and engaged the cavalry in the trees. They took a couple of casualties, and then got annoyed by the firing and charged… sadly they fell short and were caught in the open. All of my units managed to fire and made short work of them and the unit of fanatics coming up behind.

The Ansar in the open moved to threaten my left flank…if they had pressed home they would have rolled up the line.

To be honest with two units out if five down, it was pretty obvious that my forces only had to stay put down fire at long range…

My dice rolls were pretty jammy tonight and the Gatling failed to fire or move only once… I have a confession to make. I was hitting on fours, it was only when I went to tidy up that I realised that I was reading the Gatling stats from the last game. So a big apology to Joe for being a cheating B*stard. I should have been hitting on a five.

We have decided that the Ansar are going to have hidden set up, as was the case in reality, they would often appear in their hundreds outof defile etc. This will make jt a bit harder for the British, but jt should stop the stand and just shoot approach.

Today was another midge day, we were putting up and electric fence and it was a nightmare until a breeze got up. On the upside I still have my fetching veil

Happy Blog Day

Happy Blog Day to Me, Happy Blog Day to Me, Happy Blog Day to Me – eeee, Happy Blog Day to Me!

Yes I have made it to another Blog Birthday… I sort of cannot believe it, but this old piece of Internet bonkersness has been going for four years today…

In that time I have made 1468 posts, and had just under 10,000 visitors (okay 9890 to be exact)…Which is quite unbelievable too.

I am now on 752 days of daily blogging, so for the last two years I have bored you at least once a day, sometimes twice and on the odd occasions three times.

But I do want to say a big thank you to my regulars who have been great fun to be around and who have actually been a great support when the bumps jn the road appeared. Let’s not forget those people who popped by to see some toys and also to the people who just randomly drop by and leave a like, even though sometimes it seems like they dropped on my post by accident.

So where do I go from here, I don’t have a specific direction apart from keep adding to it, I am eventually going to run out of space, my 6gb of space is 75% full already. I should really stop the daily blogging, as it would allow me to go to bed at a sensible time and stop boring you all if nothing else. Problem is it has become a habit… plus I wouldn’t know what to do with the spare time… well apart from sleep.

I was going to show you some pictures of more printed stuff, but after a whole summer with a lack of midges, they have made up for it tonight. I have never, ever seen them so bad, so as the shed is about 15 metres away I thought sod it, the pictures can wait until tomorrow.

So once again a big thank you and I hope you will join me for the next four years on my journey with teeny, tiny army men.

Cheers,

Stephen