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Piles of Pikes

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!

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Pikes and Bases

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.

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Pikes Big and Small

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.

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Arggghhh and Words to that Effect

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.

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Pikes and Printer Woes

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.

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Cost Versus Aesthetics Update 3

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.

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Cost versus Aesthetics update 2

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.

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Cost versus Aesthetics… an update

I may have found a  compromise to my cost conundrum.

After Azael commented about 3D printing pikes I went on a bit of a hunt. I couldn’t find any historical pikes. I got a bit miffed to be honest as I can get pretty much any period. I put calls out on various groups and still nothing, then I noticed a warmaster advert and the penny dropped… so after a bit more searching and further requests…I drew a blank… no pikes to be had, but then all of a sudden the clouds parted, light streamed down and angels sang… on Thungiverse, the free place I came across a Warmaster dogs of War Pike block. I downloaded them and had a mooch.

Printed full size

Apologies for the naff photo, but these are in heavy armour on the torso and a mix of helmets and hats… success…

So I then set about trying different sizes to fit in with irregular. I started off with making them 9mm tall I included the pikes and eyeballed the figure… too small

I then chopped the Pike off to speed up print time and did one  ar 60% one at 50% and one at 40%. The larger size won. They still looked too small as the Irregular base stood at 2mm. So off I went again and made myself a 2mm base in 3D builder and stuck a couple of three’s on there.

My attempts are seen below…

As you can see the larger ones to the right of the painted minis look too small… so here they are with their bumped up base…

Another naff photo,  but they do seem to work. I will redo them with their pikes and paint them up have a look properly. Here they are from the front…

So the plan is… Irregular in the front rank and printed ones behind. This should drop the cost a fair old bit as the 32 bases of pikes were the ones bumping the costs up. So with these removed I have dropped the price to £50.00. If I remove the hand gunners and cannons and print some then the cost drops to £36.00.

The advantage with this pose is that no supports are required. They print at an hour 20 due the the height of the Pike, the cut down test was just over 30 minutes.

I am now off to print some hand guns and xannons to see what they are like.

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A Bit of Painting and a Cost Update

I got some of the 6mm printed samurai painted this evening… a simple down and dirty paint scheme…

They fiti in with the Baccus really well.

I also undercoated some of the Renaissance Pike, it didn’t seem worth it warming up the spray can for ten 6mm samurai….

I got a bit of paint on these too… I wonder whose idea was it to print Landskecht!

Regarding the Renaissance ideas. I worked out a 500 point imperial army, 250 is seen a a starter army. This was a mix of cavalry and 2 landskecht and 2 Tercio Pike blocks…with associated skirmishers, mounted and on foot, some guns and some generals… if I bought them tomorrow it would work out as £78.00. This is with two Pike on each base rather than four.

I don’t know why but it is seriously messing with my head…that is a lot of 6mm miniatures to paint… i do however reckon, even with my painting abilities, that it would look pretty impressive. I always like to get both sides in a conflict, as too many times others have dropped out of plans and all of a sudden there is an army with no one to fight. So in reality cost would be double the above.

I am going to have a think about how to go about things… thanks for the support and the ideas that came in.

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Cost versus Aesthetics

I have come across a bit if a conundrum regarding Pike blocks, now a strip of pikes costs 44 pence on its own on a 20 x 40mm base it looks naff. So I would need two on there… like this:

So here we have 88p worth… problem I am having is the gap surrounding the pikes on the base… so I could double the amount …

This looks a bit better (we’ll apart from the slight overhang on the right). Problem is double the figures is double the cost. So instead of 88p it would become £1.76 per base. This is one base out of either a unit of 8, 12 or 16 as you can see it would soon add up. A 16 strong Swiss Pike block would come in at just over £28, as it happens at two to a base would still come in at £14… quite pricey for 6mm. I thought I had better make it clear that I am not criticising the pricing policy of the miniature manufacturer here, far from it…

I think my problem is I would normally just buy an irregular army, so in this case an imperial army and a French army at about £18 each. I think the problem is the new rules, well those aren’t even the problem. It is me getting used to a new system where I need to work out points and follow a basing system, rather than my usual 20×40 and 20×30 ironically these rules use both of these sizes. It is more a unit of Pike is 8 bases strong. Heavy cavalry are 4 bases strong etc, which is rather alien to me now I come to think of it.

It will probably do me good to stretch my wings a bit and do something different.

Apologies for the rambling… probably just tired… tomorrow is another day…. having just noticed the time,I am now into the tomorrow I just mentioned .