April 26, 2020
The workbench focus this week has been my 15mm British supply train… lots of wagons; lots of sizes. Most of the wagons are Blue Moon and Hallmark Figures. The Blue Moon were purchased in the last year. The Hallmark have been waiting for their turn at the brush for about 20 years. I ended the workbench week completing the British field/mobile forge set from Blue Moon.
As the week came to an end, more Preiser HO scale sets arrived… always nice to see. This week the Preiser packs that have arrived are a set of cyclists, the balloon seller and customers, the shooting gallery (a beautiful set that I probably wouldn’t have purchased on its own, but it came with the balloon seller and the price was excellent), the artist set, and a monk that I will be using with my Napoleonics.
April 19, 2020
My hobby week opened with me searching around in my storage shed for some resin fall trees that I know are in there but I couldn’t find. But in the search, I came upon a Plasticville/Bachmann O scale greenhouse that I purchased several years ago from the bargain table at my local model train shop. It was cheap, about $4, because its previous owner had done a terrible job putting it together… there were glue globs, the wall and roof section didn’t join, and one of the doors was upside down and backwards. But for $4 it had enough potential that it was worth buying to see if I would rework it. I decided that I would start my workbench week restoring the greenhouse. I began by taking it apart… not easy because it had been glued together with a lot of glue. Once I had it taken apart I had to see to what degree could I make the walls and roof sections come together, and, of course, I had to put the door in correctly. The door was the easiest fix. The walls had been so badly damaged by the first owner that they would not meet correctly and that created problems for the roof as well. I brought them all together as well as I could. I hid a lot of the problems with Milliput shaped as shrubs, Evergreen plastic and paint. When I finished the greenhouse I was pretty happy with the way it looked. It will become part of my Gordon Institute campus.
I next returned to my 15mm Napoleonics. I completed the painting of my Spanish civilians and turned to painting four limbered British artillery pieces by Blue Moon. With the limbered British artillery finished by mid-week, I started work on the wagons for the British supply train… I completed two supply wagons and two water wagons. The wagons are by Blue Moon, but I used Old Glory 15s horse to pull them.
More elements of my HO project arrived this week… five boxes of Dept. 56 Autumn Trees, a Scene Master police car, the third Preiser flea market set as well as the Preiser Hostage Situation and two Woodland Scenics sets (Wally’s Weiner Wagon and Horseback Riders). I also discovered another Hawthorne Village piece that I had forgotten I had purchased at the swap meet several years ago. It is an arched entrance that I will use as the entrance to my cemetery. And with that decision I also decided to use my 1/87 scale Mouse Models iron fencing for the fencing around the cemetery… I purchased two boxes of the Mouse Models cemetery fencing years ago for another project and only used one of them so this second box is now available for this new project.
April 12, 2020
My workbench time continues to focus on my 15mm Peninsular War collection. This week I began working on British generals and staff officers and happily completed them before week’s end. With the British command staff done, I turned my attention to the Spanish civilian population. I’m also posting a picture of the Congreve rockets done the previous week that I forgot to include with the last posting.
In keeping with the last few weeks’ postings, I will continue to note additions to my HO scale project. Several more Preiser sets arrived including another from the flea market group (one to go; I’ll have three), the second street café set, the garden hobby set and the postal delivery set. From the Scene Master collection of figures I got the Cops and Robbers set and the hearse. In case someone is wondering what this has to do with the workbench, the answer is absolutely nothing. I’m doing it because I have never had a record of the actual accumulation of the elements of any of the projects I have done, and since this is a relatively small and specifically defined project in terms of what those elements will be as compared with most, if not all, of my previous projects I decided to take advantage of this opportunity and use the workbench postings as my record.
I also need to make a technical correction in terms of “terms.” On last week’s workbench I identified the weapons used to make up the whipping station for my punishment vignette as “halberds.” In fact, they are “spontoons.” Rocky Johnston, a long-time hobby friend, high school classmate, and guy who knows his military stuff, caught the error and passed it along… much appreciated
April 5, 2020
The workbench week began with a focus on a battery of British 4 Congreve rockets. With those done, I turned my attention to two small, three-gun batteries of Portuguese foot artillery that I completed before week’s end.
Near the end of the week I took a little break from my 15mm Napoleonics and turned my attention to a Jungle Cutter marketed with the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I bought it at the swap meet as a broken toy about a decade ago. It was missing the roof over the cockpit and the cutting blades on the front of the vehicle. For me the missing pieces were not a problem because they were too big to work with 28mm figures. The toy was originally made for figures that were probably larger than 54mm so I removed the huge driver’s seat and controls and turned the cockpit into an open seating area for troops. I added a new floor to the cockpit using JTT plastic and added two sets of resin bench seats that had been made for me years before. There is a short column or stack at the mid-section of the roof that will serve as a multi-lens vision scope for the driver who would be inside the vehicle. I gave it a new paint job. To indicate scale, I set a handy Star Wars 28mm figure by Wizards of the Coast in the troop area… not as yet repainted. I must admit that at this time I have no idea how I will put it to use.
Material for my HO scale Norman Rockwell style murder continued to arrive. Most of what came in were Preiser HO scale figures, but I also got my IMEX gas station. I’ll probably also include the seated artist I originally did for my Boxer Rebellion collection. On Friday the last of my Hawthorne Village/Kinkade Village buildings arrived. Its title (they all have names) is “Julianne’s Cottage.” It’s a beautiful building.
With the Portuguese artillery and the Jungle Cutter complete, I turned my attention to a vignette for my Napoleonic collection that I have been thinking about since I first saw it done in 28mm in the February 2005 issue of Wargames Illustrated. That issue included a pictorial article of Bill Gaskin’s 28mm Peninsular War collection. His collection includes a beautiful Spanish town occupied by the British, and this pictorial shows the flogging of a British soldier in the plaza of that town… I’ve included a picture from that pictorial. Putting this vignette together was not easy since no one makes these figures… at least not in 15mm. The figure receiving the flogging is a modified Old Glory 15s Civil War soldier surrendering. The drummer doing the flogging is actually an AB British foot artilleryman and the cat-style whip in his hand is floral wire. To stress the fact that the figure doing the whipping is a drummer (by tradition) I cut a drum off another figure and set it off to the side. The halberds used as the whipping post were cut from other figures and then glued into the proper configuration for my purpose. This is not up to the Gaskin version, but his was in 28mm and there is a much larger variety of figures to work with in that scale and they are much easier to work with when doing modifications so I feel pretty good about how mine came out.
