It Won't Wash

 If you live in the northern part of Britain then you won't need me to tell you that the weather is shite. We are being bombarded by back-to-back storms. Still, at least the one currently raging outside is named after a wargamer. The one due on Friday, on the other hand, shares a name with a flame-haired doxie from my youth. ["I beg your pardon," interjects the Rhetorical Pedant "but you can't call someone a doxie. It's not nice."] Fair enough, although I doubt very much she'll be reading this. And good to hear from you again, RP, it's been too long. I haven't thought about the lovely Eunice for several decades and for some reason the main thing that comes back to me is her throwing a complete paddy when the restaurant we were in ran out of steak. ["Nope, can't say that either".]

A different Eunice

Anyway, the storms mean that there is still no opportunity to spray resin casts with primer. Clearing away the previous game in the annexe took quite a while as I found that I didn't have anywhere to put anything. The fortress and all the siege works had been laid straight on the table from being laser cut or cast, and then painted with nary a thought as to what I might do with them afterwards. Some biscuit tins have been pressed into temporary service. A tin full of resin is very heavy though, so I am reluctant to put them high up on a shelf.

I then tried setting up a medieval siege, the idea being to have three players against the umpire. But inspiration has been sadly lacking, so I'm now thinking of perhaps a WWI action. To that end I've been painting some odd German figures that I had handy. But when I came to apply the black wash that I have used on all their kameraden, it wasn't there. I am baffled by where it can have gone; it's not a big house (*). Anyway, online orders have gone in for a few alternatives and, while the weather is bad,  I shall be experimenting with various ways of making figures look better without doing the hard graft of actually painting them properly.

* Can I refer anyone who wants to know why it's a small house to the early entries of the blog wherein I documented my divorce, the subsequent period of nomadic wandering and why I don't wargame the War of the Spanish Succession.

Cast before the storm

"The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its best to vex the lake"

- Robert Browning

Work has stopped on the new items for the siege works. I cast up all the extra bits that I thought I needed, and then cast up some more, rather than leaving half empty bottles of resin mixture and having to throw them away.

However, they require spraying with primer outside, and a period of cold weather has now been followed by high wind and rain from storms Malik and Corrie, which have caused quite a lot of damage around here. They disrupted the roads, which is not uncommon; the railways, which happens from time to time; and, on the first occasion that I can remember, closed the Leeds Liverpool canal.

The Casa Epictetus has been unaffected so far, although I have to admit that the garden is still a complete mess following storm Arwen late last year. The normal protection offered by the high stone walls surrounding it was outflanked by all the energy coming in from the north-east rather than the more usual westerly direction. That's another thing which will preclude spraying the new castings until I clear a space.

Cast off

 I have been doing some more casting.

The different shades are because the resin has just been poured and is curing. Later on, and for the first time so far, I had a batch not cure properly and have to be thrown away. I suspect that I wasn't concentrating and didn't mix it thoroughly enough. I shall therefore pause and reflect before doing any more.

"Always draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency ." - Franz Kafka

Besieger Gun Emplacements

 There was consensus around a couple of issues following our siege games. One was to make the game a bit quicker by starting with more of the siege works already in place and the other was about how close together siege guns could be. As I think I've mentioned before, the rules are agnostic when it comes to terrain; you play with what you have. The way I did it originally was to cast the embrasure piece separately so it could simply be slotted into trench lines when required. It turned out to be one of those ideas that were better in theory than in practice. As well as leaving the guns a bit too far apart it was quite fiddly to place on the table. So I have decided to cast up some proper gun emplacements.

The trench sections are 10cm long, so my first thought was to make the emplacements 5cm. However that's not quite wide enough for the guns and crew. In addition, I used bits and pieces from the Italeri Battlefield Accessory Set when making the masters for the trenches and saps and wanted to do the same again for consistency. That decision led to 6cm being a more convenient width and so that's what I've gone with.

The only other materials used in the masters are foamboard and Polyfilla, all covered in a couple of coats of wood varnish. I have ordered both silicone, to make the moulds, and polyurethane, to cast up some models, and will crack on when it all arrives. I'm tempted to make a mortar position while I'm waiting.

PotCIIpouri

 “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” 

                                                                - Epictetus

I took apart the siege game, via which I was trying to get my head round one of the new sets of rules that I have bought during lockdown, because I thought there would be a brief break in the weather in which to do some spraying of the bastions. There was, and it was indeed short-lived. The day afterwards my house was under a whole pile of snow, followed by several days of very heavy rain and wind, and now there is once again a blizzard outside.

"It's all my fault."

I had come to the conclusion that the initial set up was wrong, and that some more resin cast bits and pieces were required. Making them was straightforward - although there are downsides; my absolute top tip is to make sure you wear gloves - but it has been impossible to move on to priming due to ongoing external inclemency. 

"Or possibly mine."

However, although remaining bitterly cold, it did stop snowing this morning. Unlike the textured stone paint I have been using, which is sensitive to anything much less than shirtsleeves temperatures, Halfords own label plastic primer seems impervious to the air being sub-zero and so there has been some progress and I hope to be back on the table relatively soon. One positive aspect of the delay is that both sides' artillery crews should be putting in an appearance, and the guns won't have to magically fire themselves any more.

Here Come Demould - Of The Castings

"And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed)"

- Dr Seuss

So, the mould having sufficiently cured, I used it to make a polyurethane cast. That part of the process wasn't as fraught as I thought it might be. Whilst there is a limited time to mix and pour the combined chemicals - around two minutes - that's actually plenty, and although the chemical reaction is exothermic, nothing got overly hot. The results are most acceptable.

Here's a comparison with the original model:

Production is fairly quick:

Paradoxically, the fact that it has all worked first time has rather disconcerted me. In my mind I was going to have several attempts at getting the mould right and then a few goes at casting before eventually patting myself on the back for having mastered a new craft. Instead I am pondering what to make with this new not-very-skilful skill, not to mention several hundred grammes of resin. In the meantime I am going to do two things: paint one of the castings, and mould and cast something which is shallow compared to its width, just to see how that works.

Here Come Demould - Of The Mould

 "At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results" - Charles Ellwood Yeager

Having left it for more than long enough for the silicone to cure, I start to break off the foamboard from around the outside. It looks reassuringly solid.

Blimey, it is solid. It is also solidly stuck to the tile. I hadn't given a great deal of thought to how I might get it off; fortunately it responds to brute force.

And, to my complete surprise, it looks pretty impressive; lots of detail with not much tidying up to do. So far, so good.

The sap rises again...perhaps

 "As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or two points." 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson could have been speaking directly to wargamers with that sentiment really, except maybe for the bit about vigorous limbs. So, back to saps. The thing about playing a siege game is that one would need lots of saps, lots and lots. I'm not saying that I intend to satisfy that need, but I would quite like to know how I would do so should I ever feel like it. Those of you who followed my previous link to Rod's Wargaming Website may have seen this post in which he uses a rather ingenious trompe-l'œil approach to the problem. It's very creative, but not the way which I wanted to go. Incidentally, whilst he claims to be modelling from Duffy's illustrations he has made his sap two-sided, which I'm not convinced by. I also can't decide if it would make the zig to zag transition easier or harder.

I have a couple of ideas, the first of which is resin casting. I've never done it, but quite fancied having a go and so I sent off for a starter kit. When we left the somewhat underwhelming model that I had made it was tacked to part of a bathroom tile. The next step is to make a box around it - I used foamboard - into which silicone will be poured to form the mould. The join between the foamboard and tile is sealed with copious amounts of hot glue.

After that one calculates the weight of silicone required to fill the dimensions of the box, discovers that the starter kit doesn't contain enough to allow one to, as it were, start, and sends off for some more. I have been using a supplier in Norn Iron, which added a day or so to the delivery schedule, although presumably a lot less time than it will in the new year. It arrived yesterday and was mixed (note to self: get a bigger mixing vessel) and poured.

The paper towels represent the places at which the quantities of hot glue were insufficiently copious; another learning point. It has to be left for twenty four hours to cure, which will finish this afternoon. However, I am booked in for some heavy duty social bubbling, so it may well be Monday before I get to demould. Am I confident? No, not at all, but it passes the time.