Guest Contributor Issue - Steve Cooney

 Always a pleasure to hear from Steve, and he very kindly sent some photos of his wondrous ECW collection.

Steve writes:

...inspired me to take a look at my Hinton Hunt ECW collection last week and dug out some of the old figures .

Attached pics of some conversions I did way back when my sight was a bit better , shows a small Forlorn Hope party , all conversions done with soldering iron and needle files , no filler , and painted with oils.

 

Excellent - thanks for these, Steve - inspirational stuff. I'm hoping to get back to some figure painting in a month or so!

 

Guest Spot: More of Steve Cooney's ECW Troops

 Always delighted to feature samples from Steve's collections.

Steve very kindly sent me this photo; the description is his:

Nothing to do on a wet dismal September day...so spent a few hours digging through the old figure boxes and found these (attached ). They represent the ECW Parliamentarian Command Group , mounted Oliver Cromwell , Thomas Fairfax and the Earl of Essex with Drummer and Commonwealth Standard Bearer on foot .

 

All are smartened up Hinton Hunt or Les Higgins 20mm figures I converted way back. Thought they might be worth an airing!

 

As ever, thanks very much Steve - great work

 

Guest Spot: The Pride and the Passion

 Something really special this week. Rob very kindly sent me photos of his newly-finished project, based on the Stanley Kramer movie released in 1957, and I'm really very excited about it, as I hope and expect that you also will be.

A lot of impressive conversion work in here - a small spoiler: Sophia Loren is carved from a Lamming WW2 figure! All will be revealed. Here is Rob's explanatory text about how he went about it.

So here’s the result of the photo-shoot, together with pictures showing the original Newline figures used for Cary & Frank and the Lamming next to Sophia, albeit I did a bit more work on her after that photo.  Work on Cary was minimal, just extending his hat and thinning down his limbs, and Frank just had his limbs slimmed down and repositioned plus a fuse wire rope and solder jacket over his shoulder.  Sophia was a bit of an epic.  Her legs were slimmed down and her arms removed and thinned and then reinserted in the drilled out short sleeves (the original arms are too long and the hands too big); the dress and hair were built up with solder.  As you will see from the final picture even the OOT Warhammer Great Cannon is decidedly under-sized for ‘The Gun’.

Terrific stuff Rob - thanks very much for sharing your photos. Inspirational!

Guest Spot - More of Steve Cooney's 20mm ECW Collection

 Steve Cooney occasionally shares photos of his fine 20mm ECW collection. This week there are some shots of the artillery. All sorts of goodies on view, featuring Steve's legendary conversion work; from great big demi-Culverins to little Scottish frames and horse teams. I particularly like the fellows loading a big mortar grenadoe with a shoulder-yoke.

Steve writes:

Attached photos of ECW artillery , figures are Hinton Hunt with a few Les Higgins conversions and Demi-culverin cannon are mostly Hinchliffe 20mm range .

Hope you like them

 

 Thanks very much Steve; I like them very much!

WSS: Completely Irregular!

 It's been a while since I was here. Very pleased to have received a unit of French dragoons, very nicely painted by Lee. These chaps are the regiment of La Vrillière, complete with their dismounted contingent (who normally wait on the bookshelf, until they are required).

I have done a couple of units of artillery in the past using only castings from Irregular Miniatures, and I use a lot of command figures from them, to look after my Les Higgins troops, but a complete unit of horse, all from Irregular, is unusual indeed. Irregular's slightly smaller horses are perfect for dragoons.

It took me a while to get around to doing the necessary conversions for this unit, but in fact it was pretty straightforward. The officer and standard bearer have hat transplants, and the drummer is a dragoon trooper, carved within an inch of his life to accept an old spare drum from Musket Miniatures (I think) which has been in my spares box for years. Decades, actually.

The dark red colour was officially described in the dress regs as incarnat, and it is correct that the officers of the regiment chose to wear bright scarlet instead. Quite right, too.

Thanks again Lee! There is another unit of French dragoons in the pipeline...

ECW: Guest Spot

 I received an email from Steve Cooney, prompted by my humble efforts to get a handle on the Battle of Kilsyth. Steve kindly sent me a couple of photos of some of his own 20mm ECW figures (he does this from time to time, just to remind me that his soldiers are rather nicer than mine!). These are Hinton Hunt castings, many of them extensively converted.

Thanks Steve - great stuff! 

Still in the Boxes... more rarities?

 Since I haven't yet tidied up the ex-Eric Knowles boxes or put them back in The Upstairs Cupboard, I did a little more digging around, and came up with these, which might be of interest to people, like me, who care for fossils:

 

Here are some very dashing Scots Greys - I can almost hear the cinema organ. From the general style, I would guess these might be Alberkens (the official catalogue number is BNC 2, which I have never seen, even in a photo), but these are mounted on sheet metal bases, and - though badly faded now - the paint job seems to have been pretty fancy at one time. No markings - someone did a unit of these for Eric.

 

 

For comparison here are some French cuirassiers: (L to R) a couple of Greenwood & Ball, a Hinton Hunt OPC (FN 102) and an Alberken OPC (FNC 3). The Greenwood & Balls mostly have sheet metal bases, and appear to have been improved - I can hear the shouts of "Tradition!" from here... 

 

...but no - hold your horses (!) - one of them still has the original, cast base, which says "MADE IN ENGLAND by Greenwood & Ball" - this doesn't show up too well in my picture, but, if you want to see it more clearly, place a piece of thin paper against the computer screen, and rub gently with a soft pencil...

 

 

So, having established that there are some (tweaked) G&Bs present, here are a couple more - this time dragoons, again with sheet metal bases. These figures are very slightly tall and lean in comparison with Hinton Hunt (for example), but fit in reasonably well, as the pictures show, so - if you are more knowledgeable than I am about G&B (and most carbon-based life forms are) - then you can have a guess what period and range these come from. They seem too big for the three-quarter-inch diorama series. Anyway, G&B they certainly are, and 20mm too.

 

 

Here's a one-off - this is another of these improved OPC mounted figures which I suspect are both cast and enhanced by Mr Gilder - note that this is another of these distinctive, Airfix-style horses. This is very similar to the tweaked Grenadier à Cheval which started this whole study project, but this chap has gold epaulettes and a bicorn, and he has no musket, so I think he's supposed to be an officer for the mounted grenadiers. Because you won't see many of these around, I've done 3 views of him.

 

Good grief - I thought I was ugly until I saw him. A number of the PG (?) figures show some corrosion of the areas of the figure which were treated with flesh-coloured paint - I've seen this quite a lot on old figures - I wonder what the paint was? Some lead in the pigment?

 

 

I also dug out, for a photograph, some samples of an ex-Eric unit of the 2eme Eclaireurs de la Garde, which have unmarked bases (in fact the bases may be sheet metal), and they look sort of like Alberken, though I suggest that they don't look very like the official FNC 4. I have plans to restore these fellows back to duty condition, though the 2eme Eclaireurs had a very limited service record, and have a very good chance of not being required for action very often.

I hope you enjoyed that lot - time for me to get properly tidied up and get on with a sensible weekend - I hope to paint some WSS figures today, but we seem to have a North-East wind again, and the attic is perishing cold!

***** Late Edit *****

 

"I wonder what history will say about them, eh? You couldn't pass me the loofah, could you, Soult?"
 

Completely different topic - my DVD for the 1970 Waterloo movie has to be just about my greatest buy ever - I think I paid £3.90 for it, years ago, and I must have watched it over a hundred times. However, I observe that there is a BluRay version available. Now, I use a BluRay player, which definitely improves the quality of the picture from my DVD, but I was thinking about buying the BluRay disc. Some of the reviews on Amazon are really pretty terrible - subtitles in random languages, all sorts of issues.

A question: does anyone have a BluRay disc of Waterloo, and is it any good? I see there is a "Special Edition" to be released on 14th June this year - I feel I ought to get a copy!

********************

British Dragoons Finished

I see that it is only three and a half weeks or something since I finished restoring the troopers for my two late-war dragoon regiments, but my painting mojo fell into a trough of some sort after that, and it's only now that I've finished the command figures to complete the units. Anyway, it's done, and I'm pleased with them.

These originally were part of Eric Knowles' vast collection. They were a single regiment, but I use smaller unit sizes than Eric did, so I have split them into two. Here, then, are the 1st (Royal) and 3rd (King's Own) Dragoons, which, as far as I can tell (courtesy of Mr Franklin's book), were pretty much identical. The only slight issue was that I came upon a trumpeter of the Royals in reversed colours in one of the plates in Commandant Lachouque's Waterloo, but that seems unlikely enough by this late date for me to disregard it.

The troopers are Hinton Hunt one-piece castings (OPC), catalogue no BN 40. There were no matching command figures, so my solution was to mount SHQ/Kennington officers and trumpeters on Hinton Hunt horses (BNH3). Everything went pretty well - a lot of carving was needed to get the castings to fit, but it was an easy enough job, and they look fine. In fact the separate HH horses are very slightly taller than the OPC jobs. I thought of filing down the bases a bit, but these are very old HH castings, and the alloy is very soft anyway, so I left them. They are fine.

I have now placed them safely in The Cupboard, and can move on to the next challenge with a light heart!

Tubs and Jars and Boxes

Today is my last chance to cut the lawns before the gardener comes tomorrow - it's raining. You may wonder why there is some pressure to get this job done if the gardener is coming. Partly this is a matter of self-respect, if I don't do the lawns between his visits, there is just a whiff of smug contempt when he comes; more seriously, I begrudge paying him for time spent doing a job I could (should) have done myself - there is no way I am about to climb up the big hedge with a ladder and a petrol trimmer - that's what I want to be paying him for!

So this morning I am doing a little tidying around the house. I thought I might take some pictures of the various hobby jobs I have around the place this week. The pervading theme seems to be one of storage, but it was ever thus, I guess.

Dragoons in the bath - these should be a very easy refurb job - 1st & 3rd British Dragoons soaking in a very mild detergent wash, to clean off half a century of muck and the remains of the cardboard bases. I'll get them retouched and varnished, and mount them on their new MDF bases, leaving gaps...

...for their officers and trumpeters, who will need a little more work!

Meanwhile, I have been doing some more editing and testing of my (slowly) evolving WSS rules, which are really shaping up nicely. The last big job will be to produce an intelligible leaflet and a decent QRS. You may observe a rather flexible approach to a hex gridded battlefield.

Whiteboards are very useful chaps - this is version 23.5 of the Firing Rules, which is pretty stable now - we are getting somewhere when there are no swear-words in the draft!

War in a Box - this is the current state of the WSS armies, and - yes - the bases are magnetised, and the Really Useful Boxes are lined with Ferro Sheet (the stuff which replaced Steel Paper).

Look, there are soldiers in there!

A jar of Imperialists - there is a delay with the Regt Hasslingen - about 16 or 17 of their number are pickling in the stripper jar; this is Clean Spirit (not so clean), and the fellow at the front looks just about ready for the toothbrush.

This is the next big job on the Refurb front - 3 battalions of French Napoleonic light infantry. I'm not going to start this for a week or two - I have to prepare for a Zoom battle, scheduled for Friday, anyway. You will observe that there are some bare-metal boys in there, and there's a full house of bayonets. Rank and file are 1970s Les Higgins, the command figures are already painted, and mounted on the bases, waiting. Command are a mix of SHQ and Higgins - the eagle bearers are plastic - nothing else available in this scale at present - but their flagpoles are brass, which is a relief all round.

Conversions - Some British Dragoon Command Figures

I need to improvise some command figures to complement some Hinton Hunt OPC British Dragoons I am in the process of refurbishing - Waterloo period uniform. I've considered various alternatives, but this afternoon's effort looks promising. This is an SHQ-Kennington trumpeter mounted on an HH horse.

He must have had a rather uncomfortable time being adjusted to fit his new horse, but it took a lot less work than I anticipated. Here he is pictured with one of the HH troopers - good for scale and general appearance, I think. I have a slight concern that the "shaving brush" at the front of the helmet is a bit puny by HH standards, but I think some fusewire and a little acrylic putty will put that right - a simple enough job - and I'll try to patch up that trumpet a bit while I'm at it.

Officers and another trumpeter to follow, then a group paint job - could be another low-effort refurb job (with luck!).

A Touch of Class

One of the things which continues to delight me in the world of wargaming blogs is the kindness people have shown to me over the years. I've been on the receiving end of a number of gifts and favours which have often far surpassed anything I might have expected (or might have deserved).

This last week I received a parcel from one Aly Morrison, gentleman and sculptor/painter extraordinaire. Included in this package was a unit of painted French cuirassiers, as he had promised, in return for something I had sent him - as is often the case, the repayment was out of all scale to my original effort. I'm really very pleased with them, so now I have based them up I thought I would share some pictures.

12eme Cuirassiers

The figures are 1970s PMD (Les Higgins). I am impressed not only by the painting, but by the quality of the conversion work. The Higgins range was a bit eccentric in some ways - there never was a cuirassier officer, but there was a dragoon trumpeter which would work well with the cuirassiers. When Aly first mentioned that he had some figures he would paint up for me, I had a brief wonder about what I would do for command - usually I have used Art Miniaturen figures in recent years.

I underrated the man. Not only did he convert a couple of troopers to provide an officer and a standard bearer (a feat which I have been known to achieve by painting the epaulettes silver, and maybe going for a black sheepskin) - he carved off the carbines and all the support belting and cartridge pouches, he corrected the eagle bearer by removing one of his epaulettes and adding a sword handle to the top of his scabbard, and he removed the officer's portmanteau, recarving the dog-tooth sheepskin edging which is now exposed.

Detail close-up of the carving on the officer conversions

I am, as they used to say, knocked out. My cavalry reserve becomes bigger and better. Let's see Stryker chase this lot the length of the Danube, then.

Thanks, Aly - really pleased with them.

Painting - Good News and Bad News

Odd day yesterday. My most spectacular achievement was falling downstairs with a tray of freshly painted soldiers - fortunately, the only lasting damage seems to have been to the sensibilities of the Contesse, who was not impressed by my vocabulary.

I have now based up the Waterloo Life Guards - still one man absent, but now varnished and based. Very pleased with them.

Unit #334, Hinton Hunt Life Guards, with many thanks to Goya for his restoration and conversion work. These chaps were previously the spares from the ex-Eric Knowles Royal Horse Guards, and include the noted Trooper Lazarus, a write-off who was miraculously fixed back onto his base. I understand that we have located a recruit to fill the gap in the back row.

Less satisfactory was a shipment of mounted WSS officers which arrived back from the painter. Something very odd has happened here - it seems that the varnish has reacted with (and stuck to) the bubblewrap in which they were packed. This painter normally wraps each figure in tissue, which would have avoided the problem, but wisdom after the event is not helpful, and it's also irritating.

A varnishing act that went wrong. Warranty claim necessary. Ancient Les Higgins figures - not as old as the Life Guards, though

We've agreed that I'll send them back, and he'll sort things out, though it looks like a strip-and-start-again situation to me.

Other than that I spent a fascinating couple of hours yesterday with a neighbour, learning more about the history of the immediate area where I live. I'm particularly interested in a number of vanished local castles and tower houses, and also in the old farm-workers' hamlets of Whaupknowe (which means "Curlew Hill" in Scots, and appears to have been right where my house is now) and Muttonhole (which is only commemorated now by a field of the same name on an adjacent farm). These hamlets seem to have vanished around 1750. Looks like I'd better get the waterproof jacket and the old walking boots ready.