Marching off to eBay

Now that my retirement is on the near horizon, my wife and I have made the decision to downsize. Our home for the last 15 years goes on the market next weekend.  We've done some packing for storage and getting rid of stuff.  But my undisciplined style of collecting over the years means that I personally have a lot to do towards making the move happen.

I've decided to prune my collection as much as possible to the following:
30mm flats - Ancient, 1680-1720.
40-45mm flats/semi-flats ca. 1830.

Anything else is fair game.  All of the figures in this post are now on auction at eBay.  Much as I dislike selling on eBay, it's a matter of necessity.  Not to turn the blog into a shameless commercial enterprise, but if readers see anything they'd like to have from what I've posted over the years, please fell free to comment on that particular post and we can take the discussion offline.  My eBay nom de guerre is "sc_tin_man".

I also have many 40mm casting molds, unpainted flats and military history/toy soldier books like the Wollner compendium below so feel free to contact me at "cpl_trimATyahooDOTcom" about your wants.

Speaking of 45mm, some very nice Heinrichsen flats ca. 1840 will be up soon in the next post.

Naval Artillery - 35mm Semi-flat

 

Just a quick post here to show an unusual figure I found on eBay recently.  It's evidently a home casting, as Roer's Bleisoldaten shows it on the Formenhersteller (mold manufacturer) section, "Ersten Weltkrieg von HDL".   As purchased, someone had crudely painted the sailor's head and nothing else, thus a simple matter to repaint it to my own standard.

Rather an appealing, toylike figure.

Next up, a battalion of antique Heinrichsen flats, French infantry of the 1850's.

Prussian Uhlans of 1830 - 33mm Flats

Here's painted samples from a nice set of Rieche uhlans which I've had on the back burner for some time now.  No particular project in mind here, it was just a good set of castings for which curiosity finally got the best of me to see how they'd look with the paint on.

Rieche Brothers was a flats firm located in Hannover.  Love their figures, beautifully engraved and well animated. Nominally 30mm, they all seem to measure consistently at 33mm.  I have two other sets of 19th Century infantry from this maker, one painted and the other as yet unpainted castings, both very appealing as well.  The factory was destroyed by Allied bombing during WW2, unfortunate collateral damage so far as flats collectors are concerned.  I'm no Rieche expert but their sets do pop up on German eBay and the Berliner Zinnfiguren Flohmarkt now and then so apparently they produced in enough volume that the figures can still be found.

This set of castings contains 11 figures, an officer, two buglers and eight lancers. No standard bearer although one of the buglers could be converted. 

I originally had in mind some other army, but they match the figures illustrated here so exactly that I just painted them as Prussians.

How'd they turn out ?

Although not exactly posed for battle, they're still quite lively and I do like this set.

Spenkuch French - 35mm Flats

I'd bought this set of Spenkuch French infantry from Berliner Zinnfiguren a couple years back.  As well as pretty much splitting the difference between 30mm & 40mm, they also fall between the two camps of semi-rounds and flats as they're quite flat but retain elements of semi-round style.

My first reaction upon receipt of the figures was disappointment.  Primarily due to even the lowly privates being shod in officer's boots. So they remained in their box until recently when I thought of using them for this possible project for the Italian Wars. Giving them another look, they seemed not so bad as I remembered them, so let's see what can be done about the problem with the high boots.

Yup, green stuff to the rescue.

And these are the test figures I modified first.

The figure with the lowered rifle remained French. The other figure was a test conversion to Piedmontese.  Uniform details have been surprisingly hard to pin down for them but apparently they campaigned in 1859 wearing overcoats even in the summer months.  Thus the conversion wasn't difficult, just a matter of bulking up the kepi into shako form with the green stuff (sorry, the photo of these two figures in pre-painted state came out unacceptably blurry). 

So, I think this now becomes a usable set of figures.