Luckily not me, at least not yet… I am supposed to be writing my Standards and Quality report for work and it hasn’t happened yet!
What was in hot water were the dwarves…
I was quite a long way into resin printing before I found it about how hot water really helps remove the supports. So it is now often a standard practice with my prints.
I have now done another dozen dwarves, veterans this time…
The above are the two handed axeman. The other half dozen are single handed axe dudes.
I painted the bases of the sohei today, but didn’t take any photos. The dipping inks were ideal for this.
I spent a lot of today slicing and printing, but in doing so I was reminded of the conundrum… how many angels can dance on the head of a pin… my version is less complicated… now many hands can sit on the head on a penny…
As you can see from above it is quite a lot… I printed out a whole load as I wasn’t sure how many I actually needed, but here is one if them stuck onto one of the miniatures to replace his resin pike.
The Eagle came out quite nicely too… I decided on this pose as I wanted him to be attacking the Goblins I the rise…
The way I will pose him is coming in feet first, hopefully it will look okay. I also printed up another warg and rider as well as another four foot.
I am also printing up some beasties for Silver Bayonet…
Finally I got some paint added to this dwarf officer.
Today I decided to get all the Dwarves plonked onto bases, for two reasons, first they need them and second, I wanted to see how many I had and also to see what was missing.
So what do we have…
Well first are the two artillery pieces (one missing a crew).
Second row from left to right are a unit of light infantry, a unit of crossbows, heavy ram cavalry and a general and entourage.
Rear row are the heavy Infantry and medium infantry with a couple of spare medium infantry.
Now I need another unit of medium and light infantry and one of hand gunners (plus the missing artillery crews).
One thing that looks a bit weird is the organ gun. It is a short piece on a long base. Options I have are to cut the base in half, just buy some or l could put two cavalry bases together and fill in the gaps…
The latter would work nicely. I would fasten the two together with superglue and fill in the joints and indentations with Greenstuff. It would save waiting for another Alternative Armies order to arrive
I also did some simple work in Meshmixer to remove one ogre head and replace it with another. Luckily the designer had made it an easy thing to do. Well okay it took 25 minutes of YouTube viewing before I could manage it…. but the hard work had been done by them. I also shrunk down Iain Lovecraft’s Fey Amazon’s to 75% original size. This fits in better with the Dwarves and Imperials
Now part of me is thinking about a Fey army, they have rangers/hunters. Mounted types as well as some centaurs. So I could potentially have a small guerrilla force or an allied contingent. Of course the other option is to buy some Elves that go with the two forces mentioned. Have a look here…lots of goodies
I just got a message to say that the volley gun is nearly done, then work will start on the Giant (plus we are getting another unit for the Dwarves…pony mounted light cavalry). Now to be honest I am not sure if the extra is an add on as the main Kickstarter is getting s free Giant and Volley gun that they failed to meet the financial backing to get, so either way it is a win.
Tonight is another Dive into the Aliens RPG… excuse the deliberate pun. As they broke the submarine retrieval system and unbeknown to them they are hauling a couple of Androids on the end of the wire then they are going to have to come up with a way to get back into the monster inhabited underwater research station. Luckily one of them left a compression suit on the sub so a swim across the gap to gain entrance shouldn’t be too big a problem, unless of course the local fauna is being belligerent … Mwah Ha Ha ha… apologies for the outburst there.
Today has been busy, busy, busy. I have hit the holidays running in terms of jobs around the house and garden. I can now see almost all of the floor in the big shed, which is quite an achievement.I did, however, have time to hit print a couple of times. so first up is the organ gun with dwarf crew (with stolen doggies from a different set)…
The dogs are ready for their game of fetch…
The second thing printed is the first pair of Reiters….
The second pair is printing now, I made a simple change by mirroring these two and changing the pistol hand. That is the beauty of Reiters, they have pistols on both sides of the saddle so can easily be firing left or right handed.
Tomorrow I will print a third pair to give me a unit of six. I will then think about some with a carbine.
I have been looking at Renaissance flags too and have a nice photo library of what I like. The dwarf banners are going to be plane coloured I think. With any distinguishing features on the shield and disk… this of course may change by time I come to paint them. Probably some form of Runic lettering.
In case you are wondering, I made some progress on the Samurai … in that I got them out, went…nahhh and then put them away again. I looked at them this evening, I didn’t yesterday so definitely some progress.
Tonight I decided to sort out the wash and cure pot of rather grubby ISO. This involved straining it through a funnel with a filter in. This got slower as the filter got gunked up more. I have my two settling jars, which actually work really well…. I just poured this straight into them. These leave a horrible sludge at the bottom, but I managed to get over half a litre of pretty clear ISO out of them. These are now refilled and I also have nearly a litre in a used bottle.
The Sludge is now sitting in the shed roof to get blasted by the sun. Once it cures then I will bin it.
I managed to get some more dwarves printed too. Here they are with the front rank…
I tried shrinking down the Iain Lovecraft dwarf Landsknecht to add into the dwarf force… but unfortunately, even though I reduced the size, he was still too bulky compared to the others, funnily enough the human version worked fine.
As the temperature has dropped a bit, I nicked the heater out of Esther’s office and stuck it in with the printer. I am printing a couple of sixes of light infantry (one after the other). Then I have a 10lb culvern and artillery crew to print tomorrow. After that another artillery piece and crew. I might actually get around to painting them too!
I knew I was knackered yesterday, I slept for 12 hours last night, I still feel a bit pooped just now. So it won’t be a late night tonight. Hence an early posting.
Tomorrow is the first proper day of leave, so I had better remember to turn off my alarms. I am hoping to get a really good go at the samurai tomorrow. My plan is to get going in the morning with them. I am still missing a bag of cavalry.. luckily I have a pile of leave to tidy up the shed and hunt for it.
Tonight I worked a bit more on sorting out the Dwarves. So I now have a unit of crossbows, one of heavy infantry, one of ram cavalry and half a unit of medium infantry.
Part of the infantry forceRam cavalry with a mounted commander bottom right
I have a few banners like this one too…
Dwarf heavy Infantry
I still have the light infantry to do, they are the ones in the quilted gambeson on the four bottom right miniatures. There are also a unit of hand gunners and an artillery crew too. I actually tried printing them off today along with the three bottom miniatures in the top photo. It would seem that the supports weren’t up to the task, as there was just the support left for the commander and the gunner was missing a leg. The supports were the really light weight ones, so I will do my own ones and see if that helps. You may have noticed that some of the above are a lighter grey. That is because I was running out of the original colour and poured white into the vat whist the print was going on. I have ordered some more grey, but I reckon that I will be having some white miniatures for a while until it arrives.
One of my poor rams has lost a leg 😢 somehow it didn’t print (might have got too cold) but anyway this evening I took matters in hand and made him a new one … or rather took the original ram and used mesh mixer to get rid of everything except the leg.
I have just printed it….
Prosthetic Ram leg…
I dropped it into the wire basket in the wash and cure and Lo and behold it fell through and I then spent 5 minutes with my hand in ISO and resin. Luckily I spotted it in a corner and managed to rescue it.
I also managed to print the dwarf commander in both his mounted and dismounted pose…
The extra rams head is for one of the other mounts. The spare arms are in case I couldn’t decide and the spares would then become available for other mounted troops. I am printing the last two cavalry now. Hopefully they will print ok overnight.
I have sat for about 45 minutes trying to get the energy to get off my backside. I am hoping that I am not coming down with the thing the rest of the family has got.
For this reason I am having an early night. I am going to head off now and check how the second ram is doing on the printer, but the first one came off perfectly. Here they are…one and two. I thought I would show you the auto supports for the miniature. I tend to do an auto support then add more as necessary. In this case I think I forgot to change to light supports before slicing.
I need six in total for a cavalry unit in Dragon Rampant. These are just the same model reprinted. I will slice some more. They come with a lance, sword and mace as well as having four different bodies. A separate ram is available too. This means I could have mounted infantry. Come to think of it there might be an unarmoured ram too. I honestly cannot remember.
I am printing off another three two handed pole arms. Once these are done then I will count up what I have in terms of bodies and arms and print more arms as necessary.
Today I Went against tradition and actually bought some GW undercoat. I got lead belcher as I thought that I had a lot of armoured models to paint up. I will spray them metal and then paint the cloth and flesh white so that I can use the Contrast paint. I might totally regret this! So I will do one unit and see how I get on with it.
Two more days to go before the summer holidays. We had sports day (indoors) today and are having a leavers presentation tomorrow. Typically it is going to rain tomorrow so we might not be able to let the parents attend. I was doing it outside to allow them to see it… bloody weather has put paid to that.
My new teacher is coming for a visit tomorrow to meet the kids so that is something to look forward to.
So after, going on about how I couldn’t be bothered to do anything this evening I started watching one of the resident Evil films and needed up getting this far with this chappy…
I will redo him at 85% some time but for now he is something to paint. talking of which, I have eventually called it over on my first pot of my Contrast Black Templar. It has eventually run out to be more truthful, or is more like tar than Contrast paint. I will no doubt need to replace some of my more used ones soon enough too…. oh yeah, so much for the early night plan!
Well, I finished my first three dwarves and took them outside for a photo shoot…
I then decided to print a couple more to see if I could make them look a bit different.
I think I achieved my goal of changing their look. The beard and fur was made from Greenstuff the plastic bits and bobs are from the original Mordheim plastic sprue.
Bogenwald 