I have had a busy day today, but luckily was in the mood to get some painting done…

Here we have the five and a bit sticks worth of pike strips. These were already undercoated so I thought I might as well start with them. There are enough here for three bases … basically 120 pikes on the sticks  I need 40 per base… therefore three bases. I never got the rest undercoated today, which is a sod, as there is strong wind and hail forecast for tomorrow 🙄.

Tonight, I ended up starting late, so I decided to get my additional pikes put onto their lolly sticks ready for spraying…

This, with the additions of the ones already undercoated, will give me 24 sticks or 96 six miniature strips. This should give me enough for my replacements and also easily enough to round off the Tercio.

These new ones are the flexible/ordinary resin, so hopefully they should be a bit more harder to damage, however I reckon a reel dropped from a metre would pretty much knack anything it hit.

I hope to get these sprayed tomorrow and make a start onbtge undercoated ones too.

Evidently painted resin pikes aren’t jmpervious to having an empty PLA spool dropped on them from about a metre…

As you can see some miniatures have totally ceased to exist. One base needs the front row replacing. One is complete gone I think as all of the Pikes on the right have gone.

Now the other week I did start pondering on how to replace the pikes in the middle and rear. I was going to use the flexible mixed resin and make only pikes that could be glued in situ. Either individually or in a strip.

Ironically, it happened as I was tidying up my painting station to avoid things getting damaged. I had taken a surplus box of cosplay resources out and put it on a top shelf, dislodging the PLA spool!

What surprised me is that any survived at all.

I will shortly go an sit in a darkened room until the urge to swear loudly and continuously goes away!

Funnily enough I had already taken a photo for tonight’s blog. Evidently it is not a good idea to fix a 2p onto a bit of wood with Copydex as, although it holds well, it leaves a heck of a sticky mess behind when you remove the coin…

This is evening I worked on some more strips for the Tercio. I managed to make another couple of bases with the pikes I started yesterday as well as getting four shot bases painted up too.

The arquebusiers still need some work on their weapons as well as the Burgundian cross for the colours. I set these ones in lines as they aren’t Skirmishes. They need some texture adding to their bases.

So if I stick with the half sized pike blocks then I only need another four bases worth, which to be honest, is a lot of pikes. I still have two guns and eleven bases of Skirmishers to do, not to forget another four bases of Tercio shot and two bases (at least) of swordsmen. Still a long way to go, but definitely over the hump now.

I was feeling a bit under the weather today and really didn’t want to do much. I managed to stay out of bed today, but it was definitely calling my name.

So I am actually a bit surprised that I got anything anything done this evening. But I managed to get two Tercio blocks finished and a good wagon the next two done. To be fair it took me pretty much the whole length of a film to do these three sticks, but at least it is progress…

I watched Captain Phillips this evening and found it a rather good watch. I watched Castaway yesterday and Phillips today… obviously on a Tom Hanks binge.

Sadly no pikes were processed this evening, instead we managed to get an Aliens Game in. As per usual they managed to oil it out of the bag when most needed, in fact only two panic rolls were made all evening… which must be a record.

So after escaping the working Joe’s at the under water Lab then they mare off to the underwater city, which turned out to be part underwater and part in a sea mount.

They helped a life raft from the crashed space ship only to find the occupants had died when there had been an air leak. On the upside though they managed to obtain some more weapons and equipment from the deceased. They were also hunted Down by a packman scary alien octopi who damaged the craft, but again managed to repair the damage.

We also made Characters for my eldest’s game. We have a bard, a thief and a ranger. We will see how we get in with this.

Yes, funnily enough, I am still working on the pikes… you are probably as bored as I am by now. So with this I have done all of my half sized landsknecht blocks.

Tomorrow I get to start on the same number of Spanish blocks. The difference with them is that they have an equal number of shot to pike

Yes I started on the pikes again… enough for six bases or so

No painting tonight, we had a bit of a HOTT scrap. The Conquistadors had a bit of falling out with some undead…

Things took a while to get going but we did meet on the right flank…

The knights had joined the force over there as the Tank was out there with a couple of horde units and some war dogs.

There was a lot of pushing and shoving, but with little effect until one of Joe’s knights was ridden down…

The speed of the War dogs helped flank the cavalry causing Joe to pull back. Things began to collapse on the right too. I certainly had some lucky dice rolls that kept my casualties low.

In the end he lost twelve points and me two, thus ending the game.