Tonight I decided to get my finger out and do some more on the 6mm Samurai. For these actual Samurai I decided to do them lots of different colours from yellow through to black…
We went out today and found some of the lesser spotted Shetland Wallabies and a Shetland Emu…
I also got a couple more untis of the 28mm Renaissance undercoatedtoo. I went for some flagellants and some more pikes.
And finally I have printed a hundred strips of Arqubusiers for Joe and I… incidently we are having another game on Monday afternoon… huzzah!
Today our game of ‘The Men WhomWould be Kings’ took place between Joe and I. We went for 24 points as per normal and then after dicing for officers rolled on the scenario table. I was tasked by Wholsey to take the Fort at Khufurah which was sadly surrounded by lots and lots (it seemed) of enemy combatants.
Luckily for me the points of the defender dropped to eighteen causing Joe to lose his two cavalry units.
Left to right, are the guards, denoted by their red tunics( yes I know they didn’t wear then, but it let’s me see who is who). Next is a 9lb artillery piece, followed by a unit of Egyptians and finally the Durham’s. The officer in the guards was a brave chap, the Durham’s was as bald as a coot and sadly for the Egyptians their officer was rather useless. I had reduced the Egyptian points to 4 to allow the Guards to gain sharpshooter, hitting on 4+. The Egyptians ended up being poor shots as well as unenthusiastic meaning I needed to roll a 9 on 2D6 to get them to move at all.
The Guards headed off onto the left flank whist the Durham’s went right. The gun and Egyptians decided it was still breakfast and sat still.
A unit of Hadendowah bounded forwards and received volley fire as well as a clobbering by the gun. They made it no further and were destroyed to a man. The Ansar gun maneuvered to try and get a shot at the Guards but they moved out of sight, before the gun got a chance to fire.
The Egyptians eventually decided to move and were supported by the gun (who had had their cup of tea and jam on toast) and had already moved to support the right flank. The Ansar gun failed to fire and unfortunately was in range of the the Royal Artillery who made short work of it.
With the centre free of a threat, the Guards came right and the Egyptians bolstered by the presence of an elite unit bounded forward turn after turn, only to be halted by some sneaky chaps hiding in a mosque. Sadly they got no further as although Joe’s dice rolls were poor, they did enough casualties to cause them to turn tail and run for home. Sadly this meant the guards now got shot at too
On the right flank the Durham’s and gun made short work of the troops hiding in the trees
These two units then swung around the buildings to their front to support the Guards and threw everything they had at the Troops in the mosque… as I said, Joe’s dice were bad, mine in the other hand were not…
The Mosque did not last long, neither did the troops inside. With a last gasp the troops in the fortification sortied out and made straight for the Durham’s. The brave Northern lads managed to wheel and meet the foe, bayonet to sword and spear. They took four casualties but Miraculously they held and actually pushed the enemy back, leaving the field open to volley fire and a clobbering by the gun.
All in all a good little game. First one in about 2 years.
This evening I managed to get the base ready onto the pikes and other 28mm Renaissance miniatures.
Rubbish photos again!
I also printed off forty arqubusiers, and it was then that my epiphany arrived. If you recall, a week ago I suddenly had an issue printing 6mm miniatures. Today I think I know why… It seems to be the supports, and the way they work. The bases were too close together so they formed a solid and more importantly large base.
I printed an earlier set of models that I had had partial success with and when I went back to check part of the base was hanging off the plate… suction on a large area can cause problems with the print sticking to the FEP instead of the plate…
The sticks are the remains of the supports. There is a definite bend in the back bit and you can really see in the foreground where there are ghosts of miniatures. This bit was sitting at about 45 degrees to the build plate. So I went back onto the computer and, as the pikes worked without support, I just went for it… absolutely no problem at all. Forty arqubusiers came out absolutely fine.
So lesson learned… supports on 6mm miniatures are a bit of a no, no.
So today I have printed another 120 strips of pikes for Joe who is joining me on the 6mm Italian Wars extravaganza.. or as I want to put it…how many pikes do I need to paint.
Tomorrow I start on the hand gunners, I will need a fair few of those too, both as skirmishers and units of Shot to go worth the pikes. Each Pike block gets a unit of skirmishers per front rank of Pike, the Tercio have the same number of shot as Pike.. so for mine I will need 16 bases of Spanish shot and four of skirmishers to add to the pikes.
I also got some more done on the 28mm chappies…
The first of the above was taken by my good lady, probably to stop me flinging my tablet across the room hers shows pretty much the true colours of the miniatures, mine does not. The other thing that I am miffed about is that I spent ages doing stripes and things and the way the photo is taken means that you cannot really see them.
Tomorrow is the postponed Sudan war game…. I am really looking forward to it…I actually must remember to ge the rules found again!
This evening I didn’t really have much opportunity to get much done so I decided to crack open the brown paint and to get the 28mm Pike bases done… I squeezed a bit too much and ended up painting a lot of bases, some not shown…
I have also printed another hundred Pike strips… that should keep me out of mischief for a while.
I am now on the hunt for 6mm printable Italian buildings that would fit… I already have a small Spanish Town, but these are the ones that have multiple buildings on a circular base. If I cannot find anything else then they may have to do, but I managed to find pikes so I am hopeful.
Believe it or not the printer has decided to behave itself, so I have been printing pikes like they are going out of fashion. I also shrunk the command strip a bit. They now fit nicely with the pikes…
Now in case you are wondering there are 75 strips of pikes above. This in fact won’t be enough to cover my four units of Pike… each base has three ranks behind the metal front one, with two wide for each one … okay there are two spare which can be seen in the photo above. I will use these to make casualty markers.
There are twenty printing now, so still a long way to go.
When I shrunk the command strip I decided to live dangerously and didn’t support the flags as I worked on the principle that at the size they were then they should self support… thankfully I was correct in my gamble.
I also worked on some big pikes too…
They are nearly there, hopefully I will get them finished tomorrow.
Finally I got a couple of parcels, the first was this one…
The second was my Furioso supplement, which turned out to be the rules I already had, so they have gone back to AA for a swap. I was really looking forward to reading them…. hopefully they will be here soon.
Tomorrow is some more work in the house and I need to get the shed back in operation as I have a postponed game I there on Friday.
So I have had another frustrating day on the printer front, I have relevelled the print head, warmed the resin, checked the supports, lowered the print head speed, increased the print head movement and still it is being N absolute swine. I tried printing the zweihanders in various orientations to check it wasn’t problems with the supports…
All five printed perfectly, so I tried a test print with some halbediers, light artillery and artillery crews and boom, only some printed. I now have two with the long match as I did the test twice. This miniature refused to print yesterday.
Needless to say, it is getting a smidge frustrating to say the least.
Now daggerand brush asked about the resin I use and I said I was pleased with how it worked in terms of flexibility and the lack of shattering. I said I would do a little flexibility video to demonstrate things a bit better.
The hole in my finger is courtesy of a small kitten who did NOT want to go to the vet! I learned a really important lesson whilst doing the first video… do not shove a 6mm Pike into one’s kitten tooth hole. It hurts, a lot, I swore lots too.
I am now printing off another test, this time without the raft just in case it is having an effect. My originals didn’t have one, so this is a bit of a vain hope that it is that. Next stop new resin, just in case the original has got something wrong with it – to be honest the bottle is nearly finished so if I need to swap it out then so be it.
I did manage to shrink and print my 28mm guns (eventually)… the second small swivel gun for the base will just not print at all….
Today we went of gallivanting and I will write about it tomorrow. I set the printer away before I left and came back to a mess, print after print today has failed… I am going to have to do some checking to see what is going on…
I also got a fair old bit done in my 28mm pikes…
And finally in our gallivanting we gotta a beach that was heaving…
There were about six people on it… temperature got up to 21 degrees today… I actually took my jumper off it was that warm.
Today I was up with the larks to open up the school for a let and to sort out some more loft space … only to remember at 12.30 that they are in Unst today and with me tomorrow… it wasn’t too much if a buggeration as I needed to sort the loft anyway… it did give me 5800 steps . When I got back I set to work slicing pikes, now as I am a pillock I decided to increase the size from 60% to 65% for the pikes to compensate for the difference in base height.
Here is my Pike test… I put them four deep, but could drop it down to three…see what you think….
They are a bit on the large side, but is it too much, please let me know what you think as I am actually unsure. Having had closer look at the block I have realised that it is the ommnad strips that are on the larger side, the rank and file troops are actually smaller.
This is the hand guns and cannons with the pikes and gendarmes.
I think this is going to work…
I have got some zweihanders printing now, along with some Spanish sword and buckler men as well as some mastiffs.
I also increased the size of the cannon to make it into a heavy gun. I am not sure what to do for a light gun as they were sort of giant handguns on a stand. Come to think of it the Holy Roman Empire kickstarter I backed has some in… time to do some shrinking I think.
So the shrinking has happened, both the culvern and swivel guns… however I am going to have to wait to print them as unfortunately I have had my first failure in a long time…
The sword and buckler men and dogs printed fine… I have one zweihander out of sixteen and none of the officers. I have relevelled the build plate just in case. To be honest the temperature has dropped a bit, but the hand guns had a failure in the same place twice, which makes me think level has altered over time.
So in an hour I will find out if they have printed correctly the second time around.
Mini update. I managed to print off the hand guns and cannon and they came out fine.. one gunner lost his legs, but there are five remaining, not go mention he was the least useful.
I also manged a bit of painting …
I think most of the cloth is done apart from the hats. I will get them and the metalwork done tomorrow evening.
Bogenwald 