Saturday Workbench

When I got home from work yesterday my bits order from Brigade Models was waiting for me. Sadly for me, that meant I couldn't procrastinate and prevaricate about modding some 3X cars for Car Wars so one of the Wilko cars went into the small tub of nail polish remover for paint stripping. Just the one for now to test things out.

It was at that point that I realised I hadn't placed a couple of other small orders that I'd planned, so a quick trip to Warbases and GZG was in order last night, while the acetone did its job.

This morning I gave the car a good scrubbing with an old toothbrush to remove the paint. As you'll see in the pics a bit further down, there are still traces of paint between panels, but not enough to worry about. After a quick rinse in hot water, I left it to dry and went out shopping.

"Hang on - did she say shopping? I bet she ended up buying more toy cars and stuff!"

Errmm, well, you see - it's a fair cop guv'nor!

Oh, and I might have ordered a few trucks off Ebay and Amazon as well...

But, yes, back to the workbench stuff.

Taking a look at the car, I decided on what weapons to fit it out with and set about drilling holes for them to poke through or fit into. I then had to fit them which entailed a certain amount of trimming with my sprue cutters. Once I was happy with the fit, I superglued them in place. I also glued the wheel axles to the chassis and the wheels to the axles.

Later this afternoon or this evening I will get out the spray booth and airbrush and prime the car. While the primer is drying I'll be going over the "yellow" 1:200 cars with white, then yellow as the yellow seems to have turned green over the grey primer.

A Brief Wednesday Update

Just a brief update today.

On Monday evening I played my fourth and final game in the club's ADLG tournament. Once again I sent one corps on a flank march, thinking that the odds were in my favour of it coming on successfully and early after last Monday's debacle. It didn't come on and I lost. I did take some pics and will try to write up an AAR of the game this weekend.

Today I took the sprues of architect's model cars to work to spray them with grey primer. I also primed the 5" x 4" scored ABS plastic for the bases, then gave it another spray with textured grey paint.

This evening I got out the spray booth and airbrush and basecoated the cars. I knew there was a good reason to keep them on the sprues - it made it easy for me to do one colour per sprue (blue, red, green, yellow).

Since taking these pics I have drybrushed the ABS basing and given it a black wash. When it's dry, I'll cut the basing into strips. I'll paint the wheels and bumpers of the cars before gluing them onto the base strips. The rest of the detail painting can be done when they have been mounted and finally they can be cut into individual car bases.


I have placed an order with Brigade Models for some small 15mm turrets and weapons to customise the 1:64 diecast cars. I've also emailed an enquiry to Old Crow about ordering some turrets from their 6mm range and weapons from their 15mm range - I don't expect to hear from Jez for a while as his day-job is keeping him occupied.

Sunday Swag

Looking at the pics I posted yesterday, I noticed that one of the Bulgars seems to have lost his spear/javelin. Well, that's annoying but not a disaster as I've got a number of hand axes left over from the accessorising pack. It should take no time at all to glue one into his hand and paint it.

Now, to turn to the theme of this post - It's Sunday and I have some swag, so it's Sunday Swag time *grin*.

With Car Wars being my current distraction, I've been doing a load of web surfing and found various sites of interest (all bookmarked for future reference). I discovered that Steve Jackson Games' shop has almost all of the original materials available as PDFs and bought a few of them - a couple of supplements (Truck Stop and Crash City/Sunday Drivers), the AADA Vehicle Guide, Arenas 1 (which turns out to be aimed at 5th edition) and Autoduel Quarterly Vols 1 and 2. I can see myself buying a few more every month.

From the shop, I also found the forum and someone there had come up with a pretty neat idea - original scale Car Wars (1:180) using a pizza box arena. What a nifty idea - take a large pizza box, line it with flex-o-metal (or steel paper), paint it up, make up some wall, bunkers etc and mount those and some 1:200 or 1:180 cars on magnetic bases. Very light and easy to transport. And no need to faff around with getting up-scaled turning keys made. Of course, it doesn't have the same visual appeal as going 2x or 3x using diecast cars, but still...

So, on Friday after work I headed down to 4D Modelshop as I knew they had some 1:200 plastic and metal architectural detail cars and trucks. At first I was going to buy a bunch of the metal ones, but at £15 for 10 metal cars against £14 for 40 plastic ones, I went with the latter. I also bought a small sheet of 0.75mm grey ABS plastic to glue them onto.

My plan is to cut out and score a 5" x 4" section of the ABS, stick it onto some magnetic sheet, glue the cars onto the scored plastic, cut strips of the same car types and paint them. Alternatively, I could paint the vehicles on the sprues then glue them onto the ABS plastic. That would allow me to texture the plastic a little to resemble tarmac or concrete.

Hmmm, I think I'll go with the latter option.

The next bit of swag arrived yesterday morning. The postman rang the doorbell at the undogly hour of 9.30am (hey - it was Saturday and I was having a lie-in) so I had to quickly dress and get down the stairs before he left a red card.

It was a package containing these:

Yes, the Old Glory 15s Koreans from Timecast to replace the Ming packs they'd accidentally put in my Salute pre-order. I'm very impressed by their customer service in sorting this out, although it would have been handy if they'd let me know they'd sent out the replacements.

Of course, this means that I'll have to set aside some time to paint them up for my Righteous Army units. And then paint the rest of the Koreans I have. Oh, and the Mongols who are prepped and primed.

It looks as though I'm going to be pretty busy.

15mm Bulgars

I've finally finished the Bulgars! On Wednesday they had the basing texture added; last night that got drybrushed; I took them into work today and sprayed them with matt varnish at lunchtime; and this evening I flocked the bases.

So, my first completed figures since the Challenge:

I haven't decided what to get onto the paint table next. I guess I should finish CyberScooby and make a start on the figure I owe the Dux for him beating me to 1500 points.

Campaign Report

Well, I'm back from Campaign and had a good time in my two games today.

In my first game, I lost 25-0 against another Avar army. This was almost entirely the result of truly appalling dice from me and amazingly excellent dice for my opponent after the first few turns. Sadly, I forgot to take pics until things started to go badly wrong...

The other Bulgar cavalry unit succeeded in blowing up at the first opportunity it got...this one, however, hung on for a very long time against superior opponents

I'm sure I had more Avar cavalry than this a moment ago - they must have gone for a tea break or something...

This melee went on for ages. It was the only place where my dice weren't awful - they were even winning with 1 dice against 4!

My second game was a very different matter. I only lost 17-8 and got very close to winning by a similar amount. This time, my Avars were facing an Arab Conquest army - lots of superior spearmen, mostly in 8s.

The deployments

After 2 turns of movement my Avar cavalry are making their archery tell

However, my Bulgars aren't doing so well. But they're only meant to act as a roadblock and delay his left wing. Oh, and he's already broken one light horse unit.

Yup, they're broken

That's one lot of spearmen down and one fragged

Bloody useless Bulgar LH can't shoot for toffee and get fragged. I really ought to run them away before they get charged...

That'll be another three units of spearmen destroyed :)

Guess what I forgot to do with those light horse... *squeak*

I really wish I'd charged the Arab spearmen with my crap Slav medium foot - it would have helped the Bulgar cavalry a bit

Slav spearmen join the fight, but maybe too late...

The last of the Arab right wing as they die, die, die!At this point, we had both lost 10 attrition points out of 12. Now, if my last Bulgar cavalry can just hold on and the Slavs roll some good dice in melee I should be in with a chance of winning. 

Yes, well. The Bulgars broke leaving the way open for the Arabs to capture my camp

Before I could destroy that 4-base spear unit

Now, if only those Bulgars hadn't broken I'd have been shooting 7 dice at that 4-base spear unit and was lined up to charge him in the flank and rear in my turn. Oh well, such is life! At least I'd managed to kill two of his generals along the way.

Nearly Finished Painting The Bulgars

Oh dear! Once again I've lapsed and not posted for a week, so I need to do a bit of catching up. The cold had gone by the end of last weekend and I was mightily relieved. Until Wednesday morning that is, when I woke with a fever that lasted several hours and a throat that was so rough that talking was painful.

Whereas the cold before was nasty in that it didn't stop me going to work (curses!), this new one did keep me off. It also had me too achey to do any painting. Luckily, it seems to have gone now and I was able to catch up on painting the Bulgars last night and today. I've just given them a Klear/ink coat and will let it dry before supergluing them onto 40x30 bases. If I manage to get that done in the next hour or so, I'll be able to take them with me to Campaign in Milton Keynes and give them a run-out tomorrow. So, here are some pics of them before the Klear/ink coat:

Hopefully I'll be able to give you a brief round-up of my Campaign games tomorrow night when I get back.

I'm Just About Recovered

Well, that's a relief! My cold seems to have eased off just in time for the bank holiday weekend. I haven't had the energy to do much in the evenings this week apart from prepping the Bulgar cavalry I picked up at Salute.

However, with all the random sneezing and coughing, I didn't want to take the risk of trying to stick all the bits together until today. And there was a lot of sticking together to do:

all 24 riders needed to be glued to their horses
8 riders were separate torso and legs (to allow some variety of position)
4 of the riders had open hands for spears, swords, axes or maces
20 had separate bow cases to be glued on
all 24 had shields to be glued on

Lots of fiddly work with superglue and bits pinging off all over the place and needing to be found. But I got there in the end after much swearing and cursing. it left me wishing I'd gone with the "Originals" rather than the "New Era" figures.

After letting the superglue set for a few hours, I set up the spray booth and airbrush, then primed them.

I'll crack on with painting these tomorrow. I doubt that they'll be finished in time for Monday's pre-Campaign practice game, but they should be done in time for the weekend.



"The Right Of Way Goes To The Biggest Guns"

You remember when I said "no new armies"? Thank goodness I didn't say "no new projects"!! A few weeks before Salute, I saw a post on a blog or TMP or somewhere about Car Wars. I have fond memories of that game from my teenage years and the germ festered. I had found out that it had been re-released and decided to look for it at Salute, but came up empty. However, I knew that Orcs Nest had it, so I took a quick trip down there on Monday after work and bought a copy. The rules are expanded a bit from the original version with more chassis types, more weapons and with motorbikes included.

Of course, one could stick to playing using the counters and maps provided, but that wouldn't be as much fun as playing with minis.

This morning I went to the shops and had a look for some diecast cars to use. In Wilko I found these:

The single is a Mercedes Benz and cost 90p, the packs of 5 cost £4 as did the truck with police car and chopper (also available as paramedic and fire brigade). A bonus is that these are held together with screws not rivets, so no drilling to do (unless I add turrets or weapons).

In Poundworld I found these:

Ten cars for £1 - cheap as chips, but the wheels look horrible. These might end up as wrecks.


I'm currently soaking one of the Poundworld cars in nail polish remover to strip the paint off (having removed the plastic bits first). This will be a test model.

The vehicles all seem to be roughly 1:64 scale. That is 3 times the size of the counters, meaning I'll have to scale up ranges and bits appropriately and make myself an up-scaled turning device. I'll probably want to get some appropriately scaled figures and weapon bits. I'll also need to make up some "counters" for mines, caltrops, oil slicks, paint, smoke and debris.

Fun times ahead!