Foundry Day

 I have been preoccupied this summer and have not taken advantage of the warm weather to do any casting since May. My wife, being an industrial hygienist, has advised me to keep all of the casting outdoors, so hot sunny days are the best for this.  (In fact, as long as you stay well hydrated, ridiculously hot days are the best of the best, so I don’t mind the occasional heat wave.)

Earlier this summer I bought a new clean melting pot so that I could keep any potential lead contamination out of things to be cast for my grandchild, and it seemed like a good day to give it a test.  It’s an actual Prince August device that requires you to dip the metal out of an open-topped pot with a ladle, so I wasn’t sure how well that would work.  Future grandchild toys are not urgent, however, and my younger son has been waiting for me to cast some Prince August marching grenadiers for him, to complete a unit.  Working alone, casting three or four molds makes for a good work flow, so I pulled out the grenadiers he needed, a pair of grenadiers firing, a drummer and standard bearer, and an officer and musketeer advancing.  I did three at a time, swapping the officer and advancing guy out for the drummer/standard bearer after producing a couple of good copies of each. Getting 50 successful figures this way took me about two hours, including the set-up time.  I’d have done more, since the set-up time had already been invested, but I had to go pick my car up from its maintenance appointment.

We haven’t been adding much to the Not Quite Seven Years War (NQSYW) collection in recent years, but I guess the big game we did last year at Barrage (see his commentary at 10:05) inspired him, and who am I to argue with inspiration? 

I also handed off a cavalry squadron to him recently, so I look forward to having a game with some new figures on the table, perhaps by the next spring.

For that matter, I have some NQSYW figures on my painting desk now.  These figures are to complete one of the units acquired in the Annexation back in 2011. (2011 ?!?!) I suppose that it’s more than time that they be completed…

There will be a modest NQSYW game (using Charge! as is customary) coming up at Barrge 2025 in a few weeks.  I hope to have a Barrage AAR, and I also hope that I will have these figures all based and varnished so that the unit can appear in the game.

Casting with Schneider Molds for a 19th Century Project

 Through a fortuitous alignment in work and holiday schedules I was able to get five days off at the cost of one vacation day last week.  Unfortunately for my plan of doing a couple of long bike rides, we were under a “heat dome” with record-setting temperatures, making that inadvisable. 

What I did instead was to set up the casting gear, as molds (unlike bicyclists) are benefited by extreme heat.

Since the last time I cast, I had acquired one of the remaining molds to make this project practical, by my rather whimsical standards, of course: a mold making a set of three Prussian/German artillerymen in the ~40mm scale.

I have two molds for cannon, a Schneider 74, and a WGW 5926. I have had little luck in getting a complete casting out of the Schneider mold, so I hoped that the hot day would do the trick.

As it was, I decided this was close enough and I would patch the missing spokes with greenstuff or hide them with some foliage.

I was a little surprised to pour a 95% complete (i.e. repairable) example of the WGW 5926 just as I was stopping for lunch one of the days.

I even managed to make some cavalry, although they will require some weapons repairs.

These are from Schneider molds 1 and 3, I believe.  

The infantry was generally casting well, particularly the standing and kneeling firing pairs, although some marching Prussians turned out to be rather fussy.  

With some figures cast in a previous experiment, three afternoons spent at this allowed me to cast enough figures for a French(ish) army and a Prussian(ish) army for One Hour Wargames, less one cavalry unit for each side. As can be seen in the basing mock-up picutres above, my plan is for each army to consist of 4 infantry units (each of 6 figures on 2 60x40mm bases), 2 skirmisher units (each of 4 figures on 2 60x60mm bases), 2 cavalry units (one only right now, consisting of 4 figures on 2 60x60mm bases),  and 2 artillery units (each of a cannon and 3 crew on a 60x80mm base). 

The Schneider mold series has a few “dramatic” figures.  I don’t yet know what I’ll do with the “falling wounded” or “clubbing with rifle” poses, for example.

Schneider had an extensive range of molds. (A link to their catalog can be found here.) I have some scenery molds, so while I was casting I decided to make a few more trees and try a sub-scale house mold I have.

As the fates will have it, the house proved remarkably easy to cast; I got three in three pours.  The tree mold is also very reliable.  I’m thinking for this project I’ll mount the trees on round bases and scatter a few over the cloth forest bases for appearance.  

My elder son gifted me with a grandchild last March, so we have been idly considering the proper age for involvement with our hobby.  Before that time, though, perhaps the Schneider molds could be used to produce a more pacific play set:

This is an assortment of Schneider farm animals, farm people, trees, and one of the houses (off in the distance with forced perspective 😆). The fence section is one of the cavities in the mold with the cow and the farm woman.  I also have a selection of Schneider zoo/wild animal molds.  I’d like to give them a try next time.  With the recent Not Quite Seven Years War games inspiring some work, I will probably need to haul out the gear sometime soon and fill out some partial units, so I don’t think it will too long before the next session.

Home Cast 40mm Renaissance Revival and Other Random Events

 A lot has been going on since I last blogged, both in life and in hobby activities.

My younger son has returned to this part of the world, so, with both sons relatively nearby, we are looking forward to some family wargmaing time.  However, moving just before the holidays has meant that everyone has a lot of activity already scheduled.  We did manage to get a good game in on the margins of the Thanksgiving feasting last week:

We played the Battle of Montebello scenario from Neil Thomas’s Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe. There’s a full report on elder son Norman’s blog.

I managed to get my limited French Revolution collection on the table for a solo game recently.  

This was in service of a playtest of some new horse and musket large skirmish rules currently in development, so I won’t comment on that part of it, but it was good to see these figures on the table.  While Norman ran a game with them at an HMGS convention in the mid-teens, I personally haven’t had them on the table since 2009.  Until November, they had been my second longest unplayed project, topped only by my neglected little 6mm Spanish Civil War collection, which was last on the table in 2005.  I plan to bring out the French and Indian War figures (last played in 2016 when Ross came down for Fall In) for the next playtest, but with the holidays, that might be a few weeks yet.

A few weeks ago I visited Days of Knights, my friendly local game store, and was surprised to find that the latest release in Osprey’s series of role playing games was a “clockpunk” Italian Renaissance game, set in a 1510 that included advanced Leonardo da Vinci technology.

Now, as it happens, I have a 40mm 16th century toy soldier project already in hand, and I am currently the possessor of some Leonardo-type machines built by my friend Chris Palmer back in the late 1990s. I dug them out to take a look, and found them all to still be in good shape:

We used these for a year or so and then got distracted (as is so often the case).  Chris dug out some print pictures of them in action back around 1998.  Here’s a sample:

So I have spent much of my reading time these last few weeks gathering inspiration to jump back into the period, with a historical book on the early Italian Wars, and a historical novel (Prince of Foxes) on Cesare Borgia.  In podcasts, I’ve been listening to quite a bit of the Yarkshire Gamer’s Reet Big Wargames Podcast lately, and Ken Reilly, the eponymous Gamer, has been displaying his Italian Wars project lately, for additional inspiration.  So, we’ll see what becomes of that.  I am always glad when the Muses grant some inspiration relating to something already in my collection at a playable level.

I have been trying out the “slapchop” painting technique on some old Hinchliffe Byzantines.  That deserves a separate report later…

Sorry about the picture quality there…

I tried out Nordic Weasel Games fantasy solo skirmish campaign system, Five Leagues from the Borderlands, a topic which also deserves its own post.  Just for fun, I am playing it using my collection of 1/72 fantasy/medieval figures.

And, last for today, I sent Ross Macfarlane the one good copy of a semi-flat lady riding sidesaddle recently.  This is from a mold by the Adolf Hoehmann company, which apparently operated up into the 1990s and produced a series of molds, both copied from Schneiders and originals.  Information on them was found in the book on German molds I obtained in the summer.

Here’s the catalog page, as provided in the electronic add-ons to the book.  The lady is part of a series of molds making a convey and escorts, and is really intended to be 16th century, although her dress looks generic enough to me to pass for other time periods.  It is unfortunate that these molds are very scarce; the lady was the only one from this series in an estate being broken up on eBay this year.

So, that’s the news from here; lots happening, for a pleasant change!

 

Information on Schneider Molds

 

I really should know better than this, but I realized the other day that I might have more luck in finding some information on Schneider molds if I Googled in German.  (“Schneider Giessformen” …) In the process I discovered that this book was available through Amazon.  Since it is a print-on-demand, it came promptly, and even has a text (in smaller print) in English following the German.  I’m still absorbing it, but there is more information (and more molds…) out there than I had imagined.

Prompted by last week’s Not Quite Seven Years War game, I decided to return to the painting table, and dug out a partially completed unit I started working on sometime last year.  All the way back in 2011 (??!?) we acquired someone else’s partial imagi-nations project.  Most of the units have been rounded out, but there are still some partial units that have never been regularized and brough to the tabletop. These red coated troops will be a second regiment of infantry (or part of one, at least…) of the Archbishopric of Schluesselbrett when completed.

 

Battle at Gaithersbruck : A New Blog Post (?!)

 I decided to take a break from keeping up the blog earlier this year, and, if truth be told, I haven’t done much in the last few months that was particularly interesting. However, elder son Norman and I met yesterday to play a few games in his new basement gaming space. By his request, I brought down the Not Quite Seven Years War troops.  As is customary when  playing with just our own collection, though, the battle is set in the somewhat earlier War of the Western League (174x), rather than the actual NQSYW (175x).  All of last year’s NQSYW games were played with smaller units, using A Gentleman’s War or With MacDuff to the Frontier.  For this game, we returned to Charge! despite the limitation of using a 5x6 table. (I will note that Norman’s basement is big enough to deploy a 6x10 table, should we have four folding banquet tables available.)

I chose the scenario from C.S. Grant’s Scenarios for Wargames, as usual.  I have been gradually working through the ones that we have not yet tried, and I settle on scenario 20, “Reserve Demolition”.  This bears some resemblance to the Battle of Sittangbad in Charge!, although the actual Sittangbad scenario is more closely captured by Scenario 8 in Scenarios for All Ages, “The Vital Bridgehead”.  We used the usual proportions for scaling a C.S. Grant scenario to our 40s; about 2 scenario units per Charge! regiment. 

(North at the bottom of the overall picture below)

With the only sappers readily available to us being those of Schoeffen-Buschhagen, that cast the Pragmatic Coalition (S-B and Wachovia) in the role of the defender, attempting to withdraw their forces and demolish the bridge, and the Western League (Hesse-Hattemstadt, Schluesselbrett, and Saxe-Wiolenz) as the attackers.  Given that the last battle we saw in the War of the Western League resulted in a Coalition victory, forcing a river line on the road to Schluesselbrett, it would seem that the League forces managed a counterattack.

In accordance with the scenario book and the rules, we chose a 16 turn day, and diced for the arrival times of two approaching League columns.  As it happened, the first League column, composed entirely of native Schluessebrett troops, did not arrive on the scene until late morning (turn 6), about the same time that the sappers informed the local commander that the demolitions were in readiness. 

The first column was compelled to deploy under a galling fire from the small village at the crossroads, garrisoned by a detachment of converged S-B grenadiers, the Wachovian light infantry posted in the small wooded area west of the crossroads, and a battery of Wachovian artillery.  The cavalry swept around the defensive perimeter set up by the coalition, looking for a weakness.  

A freshly raised detachment of Schluesselbrett light infantry attempted to bring the village under fire, but were soon compelled to withdraw by heavy fire from the grenadiers.

The attacking infantry regiment was also quickly forced to withdraw.  

On the eastern flank of the Coalition perimeter the colonel of the Schluesselbrett dragoon regiment thought that he observed a gap in the Coalition defenses, and order his leading squadron to attack.  

However, the S-B Prince’s Dragoon Guards were ready for them, and sounded the bugles for a charge of their own.  The typical sprawling cavalry melee, of charge and countercharge, with battered squadrons retiring to rally followed.  Fate (or skill) was not with the red-coats that day, as each of their attacks was thrown back in disorder by the Guards.  

As the cavalry battle developed, the Coalition commander (a Wachovian, it might be noted) took advantage of the lull in the western zone of the battlefield to begin withdrawing some of his forces.

Soon (~turn 9) the lagging second column of the League began to arrive by the eastern road, and started to push in the Coalition defenses.  The stolid Wachovian infantry and the S-B grenadiers held firm, but more League troops continued to arrive.  Clearly, this second column represented the main effort.  

It was now time to sound the retreat. 

However, as the remaining Wachovians formed up to cross the bridge, covered by the battered grenadiers, a squadron of League cavalry appeared from around the village and swept down on the infantry.

Seeing little chance that the remaining infantry could extricate themselves from the desperate fight in which they now found themselves, and with the League infantry pushing in steadily from the east, the Wachovian commander ordered the fuses to be lit on the bridge demolition charges.

With a tremendous explosion, the span of the bridge collapsed into the river, leaving the remaining S-B cavalry and grenadiers (as well as some of the Wachovian infantry) on the north (enemy) side of the river. Casualties were heavy on the Coalition side, but history records the action at Gaithersbruck as a Coalition victory, albeit a somewhat Pyrrhic one.  

There were probably stern letters exchanged between the higher commanders of the Coalition force, about the fact that the majority of the troops safely withdrawn were Wachovian, while the Schoeffen-Buschhagen elite troops were sacrificed in the rear guard action, but history records that the Coalition did not splinter over this incident.

It was good to get Charge! back on the table after a hiatus.  We were done by turn 14, having actually started at turn 6, so had nine turns of actual play, not unusual in our experience of the game.

Once we had that cleaned up, we played a couple of shorter games.

Norman pulled out his growing collection of 1/72 scale 19th century imagi-nations figures and we played the small battle scenario from Neil Thomas’s Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe using the rules from the book.  Then we finished up for the day with a quick Bronze Age DBA game.

Over on the Tradgardland blog there has been discussion of old Schneider molds lately.  My other activity for the weekend was to try casting some of the ones I’ve acquired this past year.  It was a cool windy day, thouigh, so keeping the molds warm was difficult, and things weren’t too successful, unless you need a pine forest:

I hope the gun will work on a better day, as well as this interesting mold I have on an 18th century lady on horseback:

I hope the next post will be sooner than six months from now. 

Some thoughts on the hobby for 2022

 2021 was a bit of a slow year for gaming.  I am hoping to have a bit more fun in 2022, and have been thinking about what that might look like.

I have been trying to separate my desire for painting from any particular “get a game ready” goals, figuring that everything that gets painted will be used sooner or later, and there are enough periods and projects that are already “table-ready” to keep me pleasantly occupied painting.  That said, it would be nice to finish up the Bronze Age Nubian DBA army I started over the summer:

I would also like to add a few units (mostly specialized troop types) to the Not Quite Seven Years War. The last unit I added was an artillery piece and crew back in 2018 (or 2019 …).

  I started a group of six Prince August figures which are intended to be a light infantry detachment (for the reduced scale rules we have been using lately), but I’m still a painting session or two from finishing them.

I also have various 1/72 plastics ready to hand to fill roles in the Portable (solo) Fantasy Campaign, and a selection of vintage 25mm fantasy figures.  So whatever gets done will be good.  I had a nice string of “one figure per day on average” months, but it does look like January is going to be a break in that chain.

I did no casting in 2021, although I bought a fair number of used molds.  I would like to start casting again, when the weather is warm enough to work outside, and figure out which of the vintage Schneider molds will cast reliably.

That will allow me to decide whether I will be doing a mostly historical toy-style Franco-Prussian War project, a 19th century imagi-nations project, or neither.  I hope that this effort will resemble my 2020 project to cast from all of my old Prince August fantasy molds.  

As far as gaming goes, I have accumulated a stack of new rules that I would like to try.

I’ve also got a few older favorites (e.g. Knights and Magick) which I would like to dust off and get on the table.

I also have the ongoing solo fantasy campaign to play with, and am considering what it would take to put together a workable campaign on some sort. I suspect that the KISS principle needs to be kept firmly in mind…

I’m currently in a Dungeons and Dragons (5th edition) game, which has been running approximately biweekly.  I have posted a few things about my interest in reviving my original D&D campaign, so it seems likely that there will more RPGs this year.  

The elephant in the room, though, is downsizing.  I’ve accumulated more than I can reasonably expect to use, as each shiny new thing flashes in front of me and captivates me briefly.  Norm, over on his Battlefields and Warriors blog, has described his downsizing, and I need to take a serious look this year at what I can get done, and get some of the excess moved on to people who might be able to make use of it.  

Considering the NQSYW …

 Ross Macfarlane recently noted, regarding last week’s “Encounter at Steinbruecke”, that small games with big figures had become his preferred gaming style somewhere along the way.  While I don’t want to lose the ability to occasionally maneuver with 60-man Charge! regiments, it is a fact that home games going forward are either going to be on my 3x5 gaming table, as last week, or on a 4x6 temporary table in the library, as with the “Pass at Gelbehuegul” last summer:

In either case, the games will be more fluid and interesting if the unit sizes are smaller (e.g. the twelve man infantry units and six man cavalry units used in A Gentleman’s War), which gives the opportunity to deploy five or six units across the wide side of the table and still have some open space to either flank.

My Charge! infantry units are generally built from a single pose of Prince August castings (or two poses for the “firing line” units) plus command figures. A full foot regiment includes 48 musketeers, and three each of the various command figures.  So, I am considering, among other things, whether it would make sense to paint a few extra officers so that I could get a nice uniform look among the four derivative units each regiment could form.  On the other hand, I had long considered using a different pose for each of the companies in future Charge! regiments to make it easier to track companies on the table where desirable, and that would limit “pleasantly visual” deployment to three derivative units per regiment rather than four.  It’s been a few years since I painted a new infantry unit (hmmm….2012), perhaps because there are already enough units to more than fill the table.  So I am also considering whether it would be more fun and interesting to paint a few units designed to be twelve figures from the start, since motivation to paint 12 rather than 19 might be easier to find, and it’s likely that is how they are going to be deployed anyway.

To assist in considering this, I dug out the actual partially painted stock yesterday, as well as the box of partially unit-organized castings.  I have notes from last year, after a couple of games of A Gentleman’s War, which show that I was considering adding a couple of additional generals, and it looks like I got as far as priming some extra command figures on at least one occasion. Since primed figures on sticks have a  sad tendency to be set aside for years at a time, I should really get in the habit of writing some notes about my intentions on the bottoms of the sticks, so that I can figure out later what I was thinking … 

The other thing I noticed about the NQSYW, as I was looking through old blog posts for inspiration, is that the first game we ever played with the figures was some time in August 1996, which will be 25 years ago next month.  Here’s a copy of the notebook entry on the game:

We even have a photograph, a happy chance for the film era:

So, somehow, I think that we will mark 25 years of this next month …

Teaser — New Project —Semiflat 19th Century from Vintage Molds

 This is just a teaser for the latest thing that has caught my attention.  I have been acquiring various vintage Schneider semi-flat toy soldier molds, mostly in approximately 45mm, and I think there are now enough to put together some sort of reasonably historical Franco-Prussian War project.  If things don’t cast well enough, I suppose I’ll have to field what I do get as a late 19th Century imagi-nations thing.

There will be more about the Schneider molds in a future post, but, as can be seen, the smaller size of cavalry is a bit smaller than a Prince August 40mm semi-flat figure.

Along with the 19th century figures, there are a few knights, farm animals, zoo animals and so forth. I cast a bunch of farm animals for use with the Not Quite Seven Years War figures in one session last summer.  With the new lead-free alloy I was using, they generally cast well, so I have hopes for this.  Until the weather warms up and I can take the casting gear outside, though, I won’t know for sure.