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The Empire Musters

So as you know, yesterday I based all of my dwarves and today I decided to do the same to the spares on the Empire side. Sadly it would seem I either cannot count or have lost a pile of bases… I would say the former.

I set to work merrily glueing down miniatures to bases then suddenly realised that I had actually run out. It would seem that my seventy 25x25mm weren’t enough. I need another 36 to base the extra handgunners I printed by mistake, then I have a dozen flagellants and also a dozen zweihanders. Hopefully I should have enough cavalry bases as I didn’t order any more of those. I should have if I only go for the heavy cavalry and demilancers, but if I also print the cuirassiers and mounted crossbows then definitely not. I bought some more infantry, ogre and cavalry bases just in case. I also ordered the Furioso rules which are Renaissance rules.

So on the left front to back… crossbows, pikes and Ogres

Centre we have the culvern and volley gun with crew for both behind them are the command miniatures with some random ‘spares’ behind that.

And on the right… heavy Infantry, hand-gunners and Reiters.

All twelve flagellants printed really well, apart from the end of a two handed flail. Luckily it didn’t affect the next lot being printed. My first six zweihanders have just come off the build plate and have had a wash. They are sitting in their basket letting the ISO evaporate before I pull the supports off and then get them cured.

I got my elf duellists undercoated this evening. I tried putting some Contrast paint over the GW wood elf that I undercoated with gesso. It is very streaky. I will try a watered down layer of paint to see if that will help.

Last night I watched Tremors for the first time in an age. I really enjoyed it. Tonight I am watching Kill Bill as I have never seen it before… I am somewhat confused so far. Hopefully things will become more obvious as I go along.

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The Dwarves Assemble

Today I decided to get all the Dwarves plonked onto bases, for two reasons, first they need them and second, I wanted to see how many I had and also to see what was missing.

So what do we have…

Well first are the two artillery pieces (one missing a crew).

Second row from left to right are a unit of light infantry, a unit of crossbows, heavy ram cavalry and a general and entourage.

Rear row are the heavy Infantry and medium infantry with a couple of spare medium infantry.

Now I need another unit of medium and light infantry and one of hand gunners (plus the missing artillery crews).

One thing that looks a bit weird is the organ gun. It is a short piece on a long base. Options I have are to cut the base in half, just buy some or l could put two cavalry bases together and fill in the gaps…

The latter would work nicely. I would fasten the two together with superglue and fill in the joints and indentations with Greenstuff. It would save waiting for another Alternative Armies order to arrive

I also did some simple work in Meshmixer to remove one ogre head and replace it with another. Luckily the designer had made it an easy thing to do. Well okay it took 25 minutes of YouTube viewing before I could manage it…. but the hard work had been done by them. I also shrunk down Iain Lovecraft’s Fey Amazon’s to 75% original size. This fits in better with the Dwarves and Imperials

Now part of me is thinking about a Fey army, they have rangers/hunters. Mounted types as well as some centaurs. So I could potentially have a small guerrilla force or an allied contingent. Of course the other option is to buy some Elves that go with the two forces mentioned. Have a look here…lots of goodies

I just got a message to say that the volley gun is nearly done, then work will start on the Giant (plus we are getting another unit for the Dwarves…pony mounted light cavalry). Now to be honest I am not sure if the extra is an add on as the main Kickstarter is getting s free Giant and Volley gun that they failed to meet the financial backing to get, so either way it is a win.

Tonight is another Dive into the Aliens RPG… excuse the deliberate pun. As they broke the submarine retrieval system and unbeknown to them they are hauling a couple of Androids on the end of the wire then they are going to have to come up with a way to get back into the monster inhabited underwater research station. Luckily one of them left a compression suit on the sub so a swim across the gap to gain entrance shouldn’t be too big a problem, unless of course the local fauna is being belligerent … Mwah Ha Ha ha… apologies for the outburst there.

I will let you know how we get on tomorrow.

Posted on by maenoferren22 · 4 Comments

More Bang for your Buck

Today has been busy, busy, busy. I have hit the holidays running in terms of jobs around the house and garden. I can now see almost all of the floor in the big shed, which is quite an achievement.I did, however, have time to hit print a couple of times. so first up is the organ gun with dwarf crew (with stolen doggies from a different set)…

The dogs are ready for their game of fetch…

The second thing printed is the first pair of Reiters….

The second pair is printing now, I made a simple change by mirroring these two and changing the pistol hand. That is the beauty of Reiters, they have pistols on both sides of the saddle so can easily be firing left or right handed.

Tomorrow I will print a third pair to give me a unit of six. I will then think about some with a carbine.

I have been looking at Renaissance flags too and have a nice photo library of what I like. The dwarf banners are going to be plane coloured I think. With any distinguishing features on the shield and disk… this of course may change by time I come to paint them. Probably some form of Runic lettering.

In case you are wondering, I made some progress on the Samurai … in that I got them out, went…nahhh and then put them away again. I looked at them this evening, I didn’t yesterday so definitely some progress.

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Oooh Errr that’s a Long One

Well as you know doubt guessed, I got nothing painted today, busy, busy, busy this morning and out gaming this afternoon. I did manage to hit print three times and ended up with a mighty fine cannon and crew (with another crew waiting to be cured).

I also have the (twelve miniature) unit of dwarf light infantry cured and ready for bases too. Tomorrow I think I am going to go for some dwarf artillery crews and a couple of swivel guns and an organ gun. Then I think I need to sit down and work out what I have and what I need. I will need to sort out some human cavalry as well as some more medium infantry, some flagellants and a unit of zweihanders too.

The beauty is that I have everything that I need to print them… I just need to decided, for example in the cavalry, I have demilancers, mounted crossbows (okay they are mounted infantry) Reiter’s with carbines and with pistols). Part of me now wants some elves to go with (or against) this lot. I suppose that I should put my sensible head on and paint what I have. I shall therefore be good and get them for a Christmas present.

I am going to try for an early night again tonight… as it is overcast it is a bit dusk like out there, but I shall be good and go to bed, I even turned the printer off to avoid getting sucked into messing around with that. Speaking of printers, it does seem to be behaving at the minute 🤞🤞🤞.

Tonight’s game was another hoot. The stranded crew ended up doing all kinds of weird things that upset the Working Joe’s they also found the missing NPC who had turned into some kind of weird monster courtesy of Weyland Yutani. They somehow managed to beat him, but before they could finish him off he managed to escape into the base. They then managed to steal the submarine and were last seen hurtling off into the depths… only to realise that the only way to escape is to use the long range communications array back in the base… which they sort of had to break to escape. So somehow they have to work out how to get into an undersea base that has a very angry scary monster and some working Joe’s who no longer seem that well disposed towards them… stress dice are certainly adding up… one of them has six already the other two have four…. what can possibly go wrong!

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A Night with the Printer

Tonight I decided to sort out the wash and cure pot of rather grubby ISO. This involved straining it through a funnel with a filter in. This got slower as the filter got gunked up more. I have my two settling jars, which actually work really well…. I just poured this straight into them. These leave a horrible sludge at the bottom, but I managed to get over half a litre of pretty clear ISO out of them. These are now refilled and I also have nearly a litre in a used bottle.

The Sludge is now sitting in the shed roof to get blasted by the sun. Once it cures then I will bin it.

I managed to get some more dwarves printed too. Here they are with the front rank…

I tried shrinking down the Iain Lovecraft dwarf Landsknecht to add into the dwarf force… but unfortunately, even though I reduced the size, he was still too bulky compared to the others, funnily enough the human version worked fine.

As the temperature has dropped a bit, I nicked the heater out of Esther’s office and stuck it in with the printer. I am printing a couple of sixes of light infantry (one after the other). Then I have a 10lb culvern and artillery crew to print tomorrow. After that another artillery piece and crew. I might actually get around to painting them too!

I knew I was knackered yesterday, I slept for 12 hours last night, I still feel a bit pooped just now. So it won’t be a late night tonight. Hence an early posting.

Tomorrow is the first proper day of leave, so I had better remember to turn off my alarms. I am hoping to get a really good go at the samurai tomorrow. My plan is to get going in the morning with them. I am still missing a bag of cavalry.. luckily I have a pile of leave to tidy up the shed and hunt for it.

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The Dwarves Muster

Tonight I worked a bit more on sorting out the Dwarves. So I now have a unit of crossbows, one of heavy infantry, one of ram cavalry and half a unit of medium infantry.

Part of the infantry force
Ram cavalry with a mounted commander bottom right

I have a few banners like this one too…

Dwarf heavy Infantry

I still have the light infantry to do, they are the ones in the quilted gambeson on the four bottom right miniatures. There are also a unit of hand gunners and an artillery crew too. I actually tried printing them off today along with the three bottom miniatures in the top photo. It would seem that the supports weren’t up to the task, as there was just the support left for the commander and the gunner was missing a leg. The supports were the really light weight ones, so I will do my own ones and see if that helps. You may have noticed that some of the above are a lighter grey. That is because I was running out of the original colour and poured white into the vat whist the print was going on. I have ordered some more grey, but I reckon that I will be having some white miniatures for a while until it arrives.

On a totally different note, what is thought to be the oldest evidence of a shark attack has been found in Japan. https://archit.web.ox.ac.uk/article/reconstruction-oldest-shark-attack-human-tsukumo-shell-mound-japan?fbclid=IwAR3GTHFwN96iBRHDz52dXq8N_C0_9gWiBZsSlBVad-FmeRg-hmbJb6WaVBQ

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Dwarf Cavalry

One of my poor rams has lost a leg 😢 somehow it didn’t print (might have got too cold) but anyway this evening I took matters in hand and made him a new one … or rather took the original ram and used mesh mixer to get rid of everything except the leg.

I have just printed it….

Prosthetic Ram leg…

I dropped it into the wire basket in the wash and cure and Lo and behold it fell through and I then spent 5 minutes with my hand in ISO and resin. Luckily I spotted it in a corner and managed to rescue it.

I also managed to print the dwarf commander in both his mounted and dismounted pose…

The extra rams head is for one of the other mounts. The spare arms are in case I couldn’t decide and the spares would then become available for other mounted troops. I am printing the last two cavalry now. Hopefully they will print ok overnight.

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A Bit on the Wobbly Side

I have sat for about 45 minutes trying to get the energy to get off my backside. I am hoping that I am not coming down with the thing the rest of the family has got.

For this reason I am having an early night. I am going to head off now and check how the second ram is doing on the printer, but the first one came off perfectly. Here they are…one and two. I thought I would show you the auto supports for the miniature. I tend to do an auto support then add more as necessary. In this case I think I forgot to change to light supports before slicing.

I need six in total for a cavalry unit in Dragon Rampant. These are just the same model reprinted. I will slice some more. They come with a lance, sword and mace as well as having four different bodies. A separate ram is available too. This means I could have mounted infantry. Come to think of it there might be an unarmoured ram too. I honestly cannot remember.

I am printing off another three two handed pole arms. Once these are done then I will count up what I have in terms of bodies and arms and print more arms as necessary.

Today I Went against tradition and actually bought some GW undercoat. I got lead belcher as I thought that I had a lot of armoured models to paint up. I will spray them metal and then paint the cloth and flesh white so that I can use the Contrast paint. I might totally regret this! So I will do one unit and see how I get on with it.

Two more days to go before the summer holidays. We had sports day (indoors) today and are having a leavers presentation tomorrow. Typically it is going to rain tomorrow so we might not be able to let the parents attend. I was doing it outside to allow them to see it… bloody weather has put paid to that.

My new teacher is coming for a visit tomorrow to meet the kids so that is something to look forward to.

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Printer Woes…Again

There are some days when there aren’t enough swear words in the world to suffice. I went to sort things out this morning and found some rather deep scratches on the glass bed…I managed to get two banners and a mace and shield off the plate, no miniatures were in evidence.

I haven’t got a clue where the scratches came from. The only thing I can think of is that something had got stuck to the vat and when I moved it then it scratched the glass. I tried printing again and although I got something off I still had failures. Now I forgot to reset the lift speed which might account for things. The scratches were in the same place as some of the failures but not all, so that might not be the cause…

I got a miniature off the bit where the centre scratch is…. here he is….

As things are upside down things look weird… the two missing figures should have been bottom left and the three missing pole arms bottom right. It is all a bit annoying and confusing. I will re level tomorrow and print six miniatures, each in a different place and see if I can work things out. wish me luck!

I did manage to finish the unit of twelve Dwarves…

I also ordered a pile more of these bases… hopefully they will come sooner rather than later.

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The Dwarves Muster

Today I managed to get some more Dwarves printed… All was going well until this evening when I went to print the last one (well actually three) with their banners…two of the three printed and the banner sort of did. So I relevelled and set it off again. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have something to show for it.

Anyway here are my heavy Infantry without their banner…

I also managed to get my rear rank of pike done… now interestingly there is one missing. Part of me now wonders if it failed and caused a problem in the vat…

I also have a large problem… The above is the last base I had! I am hoping that I can get some more, otherwise it is going to be an absolute sod if I have to change them into something else part way through. These came with my Flintloque miniatures and I transferred them onto 2p’s or mdf bases. I never thought I would actually run out of the unused bases.