Xmas presents

Now to say that I was on a deadline for Xmas was a bit of an understatement. 3 days before and I still needed to do the figures for 2 presents.

So armed with a can of the wonderful Army Painter Platemail spray and some new black ink I started work on the Dwarf General and her bodyguard (Fire Giant figure but it looks like a huge Dwarf)

I managed to get them done in record time. And I have to say I am very impressed with the details that the Bones figures have. Only slight problem was the belt on the Giant where I had to green stuff the gaps on either side but it was 5 minutes work so no chore.

For the 2nd project it was a conversion of 2 B-Wings for the X-Wing game into a Deathraven. Went very quickly. Was surprised by how easy the conversion was once I had decided where to make the cuts.

Now on to the New Year projects.......

Post Xmas blues....er Greens...

Well the madness that is Xmas has come and gone. I failed to complete my task of global domination but I did manage to do more work on the Minotaur unit and the unit of Bigguns for the Orc army.

The Reaper Bones Minotaurs proved to be a delight to convert even further then I had previously. Every one of the 10 figures is now unique.

As I was busy doing these I also sorted out the Reaper Bones Bugbears I will be using as Bigguns. I wanted a compact unit of 12 armed with spears but they only came with clubs so out came the hobby tools ;)

I removed the standard shields, will reuse those on another project, maybe the Fimir one :) The clubs came off too and some were used on the Minotaur project. Once weaponless I drilled out the hands with a cordless drill on very slow speed and the slid wide wooden skewers that had been cut to the right length through the hole. Tight work but it was worth it. The front rank of the unit I reposed slightly so that arms were not in the way of the 2nd rank. I then added slightly better sized and shaped shields as the ones they came with have all manner of spikes on them.

As a size comparison the figure on the left is a metal Big Orc from the Grenadier range. The right hand figure is a standard orc.

All told the conversions went rather well. Now to paint them.

As a Side Side Project, and inspired by the use of the Orc sword blades for the Dwarf pickaxes I noticed that the spear end from the Orcs were of a suitable size to help me repair some broken Chaos Snakemen I had traded for.

These were pinned, not an easy job, and then glued.

Again it is a good enough conversion as the figures will be used as a replacement type of Saurus in my modified Lizardman army when I finally get round to doing the work on that one.

In light of my little experiment with the Orcs and Minotaurs I do have to admit that things are in progress for the Dwarf army too but a shortage (dwarf joke there) of bases has held things up a little.

I had started out with the 3 poses from em4 but the integral bases are just WAY too large for dwarves. So like some other Dwarven Generals out there I took to cutting down the bases and sticking them on 20mm bases.

When posed next to the metal Dwarves from Grenadier you can see that they scale really well.

While waiting for more bases I did manage to get my hands on a few...ok.. a lot of artillery. Coming from Ral Partha the scale is slightly different but nothing that causes upset.

I relearned a very important lesson when making these up. Super Glue does not like to set up when cold. One small heating fan later they artillery started to set up just fine.

Now I did have a few 20mm bases hanging around and one of the special units for Dwarves in WFB 3rd Ed are the Sappers that operate in units of 2. GW currently does a range of Dwarf Miners and so do some other companies but none look like they are kitted out for the battlefield. With this in mind I started thinking how to make my own.

Choosing the Dwarf with Axe as the base figure I was trying to work out how to make a Pickaxe when it suddenly dawned upon me that I had the bits right in front of me. In this case literally as I had the spare swords from the Orcs I had turned into Musicians or given other hand weapons too so they could be used as Champions.

Cutting off the Axe head (saved for further conversions of course) I trimmed 2 of the swordblades and stuck them together in a bow shape and added them to the end of the headless axe shaft.

I think this works well and 4 of them took form very quickly.

Now to just wait for all the bases to arrive and spend a weekend rebasing 200 Dwarves :S

As a bit of a side project while the Orcs were drying I decided to have some fun with the Reaper Bones Minotaur figures I had gotten my hands on.

Now for those of you that have never encountered this range of figures the company Reaper has been transitioning from metal to a flexible plastic to make the figures cheaper and less likely to get damaged.

Now my first thoughs were, no, NO, HELL NO.

I was wrong. They are flexible but not so much that it reduced the useability of the figures and whilst the detail is not as great as a resin master figure it is about 95 to 98% as good which when you need loads of a figure is ok and the price is great. These figures retail at under £2.60 each.

The one down side is that there is only one pose. Not a problem for those willing to wield the knife and super glue.

The plastic is easy to cut with a sharp blade. You just need to be firm and careful.

For the first of the conversions I decided to just do a weapon swap. the figure comes with an axe in one hand and a cleaver in the other (middle figure in the picture). So to get some variety I turned one into a 2 axe wielder and the other into a 2 cleaver wielder.

Total time to cut and glue was about 10 minutes.

The plan is to do a little more mixing and matching with some Bugbear weapons, some extras left over from some Mantic Ogres and to add in at least a standard bearer. More on that next time though.

Ok so the title of my Blog sort of says it all. Well maybe not all.

So here goes. My first ever Blog. Now to reveal my evil and cunning plan to take over the world.....what...what do you mean it isn't a plot to do that. Are you sure? Oh OK then.

It seems global domination is on a back burner but until then I plan on doing a few articles about some wargaming (and maybe Role Playing) projects I am working on.

Due to a decidedly huge boost of nostalgia I recently decided that I was going to get into Oldhammer (Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd Edition for those that do not know the other term) and as per usual I needed to do it on the cheap....welll...as cheap as I can and still have loads fo fun toys.

I have Dark Elf, Skaven and Lizardman armies sitting in cases in storage in the UK but as I live in Austria that does not help much. So looking into my RPG range fo figures that I had planned on using for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I discovered I had the start of a number of armies.

Due to some judicious trading and selling of odd old and sometimes hard to find items I managed to get the funds together to expand these into useable armies and/or Ally/Mercenary units.

The first one is an Orc and Goblin army. The core of which is provided by a series of one piece scuplts in plastic that came from Grenadier's Fantasy Warriors game. The game is long out of print but the lovely guys at em4 miniatures (http://em4miniatures.com/) still produce the figures and do packs of 50 of one pose for £7.70 (£0.16 per figure roughly). These and some Grenadier metal Orcs that I picked up from Mirliton (http://www.Mirliton.it) formed the base of the army.

The 3 poses are with a sword, with a spear and with a bow.

For the most part I planned on using the figures as is, maybe adding shields to help differentiate the units but musicians and standard bearers and maybe heroes presented a slightly larger problem.

Luckily the poses lend themselves to conversion work.

The 2 poses best suited for conversion are the spear and sword ones.

There is some flash on these figures but it is easily removed with a sharp knife.

Sorting through my bits box I came up with a number of banner sections and instruments and the odd weapon from other kits (mostly GW ones) so I promptly started to hack figures up and glue them back together like a modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

As you can see a variety of banners, weapons and musical instruments were added to great effect. And with the easy availablity of bits from kits on eBay, from where GW now put so much into a box that there are too many options, it is not expensive to pick up conversion bits.

Here are the command units in with their regiments.

I then started to work on the archer units but by then the bits box was getting a little low on bits so I improvised. Still need to add a few more figures and do the musicians for the units but you can see the direction I am going in.

All in all I ended up with 210 plastic figures and with the conversion work this turned into 10 x 20 Orc units. All for under £35.