I came soooo close to finishing my first Pike block this evening. I basically have a strip and a half or miniatures to add to make an eight base unit. I worked on both the Pikes to add to it as well as the skirmishers to stand infront of it.
Hopefully by tomorrow evening I will have my first Pike block completely finished. That will only leave three to go…🙄
Now as you can see frommthe above that is one hefty Pike block. Now each if my pikes has 8 bases per Pike block. It suddenly dawned on me that I could for speed reasons count the above as 16 bases. Each base could be equal to two. I will have to ponder this tomorrow…
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…
Normally I only get two lolly sticks worth of pikes done, but this evening I managed six. I was either painting faster or for longer… probably longer, but either way that is still a big ol’ chunk of pikes part way there. Gary need hats, feathers and weapons done and that’s about it….
In case you think I cannot count, the two at tye back were fine yesterday
Thankfully tomorrow is the last day of term and hopefully we will hear if we can escape house arrest too.
Well today, the stress levels went through the roof as I was stuck at home with kids who were coughing, that was bad enough, but I couldn’t find anyone to cover for me. Luckily one of the central officers went in and helped out otherwise the school would have shut. Of the 21 people I spent today phoning to cover tomorrow nineneteen couldn’t help out and two never got back to me…luckily I have managed to get someone who was meant to be elsewhere but as the school is down to three pupils due to a Covid outbreak then she is coming to me jnstead.
So onceI calmed down this evening I managed to get so e more paint onto thenext pair of lolly sticks, but I also have the makings of a Pike block….
I am missing a fourth row on my third base, but progress is being made.
Tonight I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, unfortunately my son was hopping around playing on the console with his headphones on and he hopped a bit too far and pulled it off the shelf… long story short it is B*ggered… it was quasi knackered anyway, but I think it has all but reached the end of it’s life. To be fair it is about five and a half years old, so was well worth it’s money, except we got it free with a car purchase (my mother in law got the car).
I did manage another couple of strips started, this time I went for bigger blocks of colour over the grey…
The pikes in the rear panic at the sight of blobby coloured munchkin pikes..
I will get the metallic and flesh tones done the same as the first lot so then a comparison can take place. To be honest they will mix and match with the other ones. It is really funny, but because of they way they are standing it looks like all of them are single colour.
I also got the green painted on the other bases… my next conundrum, however, is do I take my time on each front rank for each base or do I just carry on the way I am doing as the casualties can always be take from the rear so the metal front rank remains until the end.
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.
Normally I would have put a sleeve on the wires, when I have stripped the outer cover off to get them into a small space… evidently, in this case I forgot!
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 🙄
Today I managed to brave the wind that kept blowing the sticks off my board and got into the relative calm of the pony shed. As expected, the force of the spray can knocked a few over and a few off the board entirely. I did manage to get them done eventually…
When this evening came I managed to do a couple of test strips to see how they looked and to be honest I think this idea works.
I threw Gryph Charger grey on as a base coat, then, whilst still wet, I threw on spot colours of my brightest red, blue and green.
I did a bright colour test for one of the flag blocks, but to be honest, I think I will stick to the method above.
I had intended to get these plonked in behind the metals, but unfortunately, with the weather closing in – we are due force ten winds and heavy rain, we decided to get our old pony into the shed, which happened to be full of junk.
I will get the feathers and spear points painted tomorrow and then do a test shot to see what I think.
Tonight I finished the last of my Irregular Miniatures order…namely the two loaded wagons….
This means that I am part way to finishing the Imperial Army… so since I started on I have done this lot…
We now have the small matter of hundreds of resin strips to do. Now technically they should be faster as I am meant to be flinging some muted colours on some of them and doing the sides and back a bit brighter. Now as I have never tried anything like this before then it might take a bit of trial and error which may slow things down a bit.
We are now having a gale, so spraying the resin miniatures tomorrow may not go ahead. I am now off to cover up my toys as it seems the big shed has sprung a few leaks!
Bogenwald 