Tonight I worked on the eight strips of pikes got them finished…

I had to repaint a dairy few helmets this evening as I had a bit of a wobble on the old painting hand when I was doing the pikes. Tomorrow I will get them added to the bases and see how far we get.

After doing a lot of 6mm and 2mm miniatures I did have to laugh at this…

This will probably be my title for about the next six weeks at least… But anyway I managed to get the next two strips done…

So from left to right the full base, the newly finished pikes and the spares from the original two strips. I will get the new lot based up tomorrow.

I found another Kickstarter to jump on… https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/buryak/tamed-and-wild-ones-prehistoric-beasts-and-terrains?ref=android_project_share this is from the same designer who made the wolves and wooly rhino.

Because of the swollen, sore finger, read on to find out why, I decided that I wouldn’t be painting tonight so instead I did a test run on the resin pikes behind the metal ones… I think it might just work… now it definitely won’t win any prizes, but it is getting models painted quickly…

These still need the bases painting green, you can see the light grey in places. Now funnily enough, as I was typing this, I was having a fiddle with them. And if truth be known, at a distance, the rough painted ones actually look better than the metals… it is probably as they weren’t as fussy a miniature, so there is less for the different colours to blend in to the others.

After weeks of dropping these, flinging them in boxes and being quite rough with them etc. Imanaged to snap a flag and a pike within minutes. They snapped with, what seemed like, vertical compression. If the worst, comes I will add in extras with pins or paperclips, so I am not unduly worried (probably famous last words).

So now, I know you all are desperate to find out if I fixed the conservatory..if you are then read on, if not come back tomorrow for more toy related shenanigans.

Today I worked on the conservatory and have mad some progress in finding the cause of the problem. First up there was a crack in the live which was obviously touching something.

The weird thing is, it hadn’t happened at the start so after I got to it it was there. So I took this cable out and everything worked fine. I moved the far socket cable and ‘pop’ off the RCD went again. I did a lot more testing from the junction box and it is somewhere in the 3 metres of cable. I checked both ends and it is fine, so it must be somewhere along the length. I did notice that the cable ends seemed to be fracturing quite a bit (this is something I have never, ever seen before. There are two options, one I have somehow fired a nail into the wire and the wind has caused it to work its way into the live. It does seem a bit weird though. The second option is that the cable has fractured at a corner, with it being a wooden structure there will be some movement in the gales, I am thinking it has moved the cable just enough on a corner for it to fracture. I might not find out for a while as I am rerouting the cable (in trunking) along the bottom of the wall so that I can get to it a whole lot easier.

In the process of removing one of the ceiling planks I belted myself with a hammer, this made me swear quite a bit. I eventually gave up this evening as my hand was sore and the light was dropping. I did manage to leave one hell of a mess though 🙄

Well this evening has been ‘one of those’ ones, well pretty much today has. We woke up to a power cut, but on closer  inspection it turned out something had tripped the RCD. The power to half the house sockets was off. This included the Internet. I get to work to find my teacher couldn’t come in today,  she had let me know yesterday  that she wasn’t feeling too good.

I covered for her, so didn’t get my report for this evening’s parents meeting done. I came back home and checked behind all of the face plates on the sockets, in case a wire had come adrift or had become exposed, but nope, nothing.  I have removed all the plugs just in case, but nope it still keeps tripping. I am at a loss and will have to get someone in.

MS Teams decided to play silly buggers and wouldn’t let me in… I had go use my personal email address to join. Managing to get in 30 seconds before it started, still without a report. When I say without a report, I had things to say but normally have it written so that my admin doesn’t have to make notes.

A two hour meeting  took place with me in the dark and cold,using a 15m extension spool from the kitchen to allow the Internet to work.

So quite frankly I am not in the mood, not to mention that my painting table has no lights on it.

This evening I worked on these two units of knights. These are going to have different coloured pennants on their pointy sticks. A bit like they have different coloured plumes on their heads.

I would have got more done, but quite frankly my bum had gone to sleep, so I packed in for the evening. I got some more done on the two general bases too.

We got the news today that my son’s PCR test had come back negative so I was allowed to go and buy some milk.

I also brought in my next lot of printed pikes… somehow I managed to squeeze two of them together… in hindsight it might have made my printing job a bit easier if I had done something similar from the start.

I have had a bit of an easy day today. I nipped into town to get my new book that the book shop had ordered in for me…

When I was a kid my parents got me a subscription to Look and Learn. The one main thing I can remember about it was the Trigan Empire. That and somewhat spurious articles. So when the kids and I were in the book shop last week I saw volumes two and three so just had tofrt the first one.

I managed to get the cavalry put knto bases and some sa d put on for texture… now this is where I almost had a mishap. I was cooking dinner in the oven and the pva wasn’t dry and I wanted it to be… can you guess where this is going?

So I popped them and their Cork tile on a tray in the ovenfor a couple of minutes…yeah right…about twenty minutes later I looked to see if the PVA was dry and realised to my horror that they were still in the oven…. luckily everything survived the process…

Here they are after their spell at gas mark 8. There were a couple of big bubbles of something, either superglue or basing glue, but a poke with a nail flattened them out. I will try and get the whole lot sprayed tomorrow morning.

Tonight we played the Firefly boardgame. We started off with the first mission for new players. This was pretty much over in an hour… I managed to win the first game by some totally legal means…

As it was over so quickly we moved onto another set of missions, this one took about two and a half hours. We had to be the first to get to $12000. Joe managed it, but unfortunately still had $6000 worth of jobs outstanding. Luckily I had just finished two of mine so actually ended up winning by default. To be fair his dice rolls were spectacularly bad, anything but a one, produced three ones in a row….

The game was a laugh, so it is something we will probably play again sometime.

This evening I thought I had better get rid of some of the half finished projects on my painting station. As the 2mm cavalry and infantry were on the top I went with them.

Because of Birthday, bath and bed, I really didnt have time to do too much. Flesh over everything then starting to add different browns etc for the cavalry and then white for the shield fronts on the Greek infantry. These will get the bronze armour done next.

As for the 6mm Italian Wars stuff, well I am going to have to go back through my blog to see what size I printed them at… 60% I think, but I will have to give it a look see.

When I said yesterday that I thought I had enough arqubusiers… this is what I am talking about…

Now I think I gave Joe a pile, perhaps not, that might be the reason why I still have an armies worth in a box.

I am actually feeling a little daunted with the task ahead. So to get myself into the groove I am going to go for well painted (relatively in my case) on the front row on each base with speed painting on the following ranks. As you can see by the photo I showed yesterday, there isn’t much room to see a lot of high quality paint work.

To be honest I could probably get away with painting the outside two and then getting the rest done in a dark wash, with the odd splash of colour on the upper torso and head. The one thing I do know is that I am going to hate painting pikes by time this is over.

I know I am grumbling a bit, but I do reckon they are going to look pretty good by time they are all finished.

I managed to get the sand covered in PVA this morning, so it was ready to paint this evening…

I got cracking with the bases painting the base green level with added brown for roads and building areas…

This photo was taken four hours ago and the paint is still wet… so I have indeed been watching paint dry this evening. I couldn’t be bothered to go and get a mixing tile so grabbed the next best thing…

Yes a good old Tesco Yeast extract lid was washed and available.

My Friend Carl pointed me in the direction of a new Kickstarter…and as I am running an Alien RPG … I just had to go and have a look…. we all know where this is going don’t we! Aliens

I am doing a freebie one this evening… five and a half hours… I am used to 50 minutes…. I am doing a couple, one for me and one for Carl. Freebie

I will find out tomorrow how well they have come out.

This evening I decided to crack on with my Roman farms and vineyards l decided to use what I had handy so they went on the 80 x 40 MDF that was in the house. My old CD’s were in the bottom shed and it was heaving it down.

So they don’t look like much now, but I am hoping with a bit of paint that they will look OK.

The vineyard in the foreground is wool wrapped around the base that is covered in Copydex… I had an assistant for the wool winding part…

Why is it when you do two or three test runs that work perfectly, when you add the glue it all goes to pot?

Tomorrow I will get these covered in watered down PVA to seal down the sand..if I am clever I will remember to do them jn the morning, ready for painting tomorrow evening.