Cleaning can bring unexpected revelations

These days I made a cleaning test. I took samples from some groups of the newcomers to find out if the paint is easy to strip. And there is a reason for that. Sometimes the old paint definitely does not dissolve and you end up having minis that stay half painted. Horrible to work with...

So I put these guys in paint thinner and forgot about them for more than a week. And I was right to test it beforehand. The male and female barbarians and the dwarf on the top left have kept most of their paint and therefore should not be treated with paint thinner. Now I know which groups I can clean easy and on what figures I have to work on top of the old paint.

Yes, I know, I said that I don't want to strip the paint this time, but working on some of the miniatures I found out that working on old paint that once was applied to thick is not so funny. A lot of the details are lost. I changed my mind on this.

Remember the miniatures I called 'Smurf Elves'? I did so because of the blue skin they have. But now one of them is free of paint and glue I was able to read what's written under the base: "Garrison" and "SS87". According to the StuffofLegends website this is a "Man-goblin with bow and spear" from their Sword & Sorcery range. "Sculpted by the late John Braithwaite and based on the Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian novels" (LostMinisWiki)

Fine, now let's find out what a "Man-Goblin" is and where they appear in the Conan stories... ;-)

The "Orc" has the mark "RAF" and "C." and "1985". I did not believe for a second that the Royal Air Force ever made orc miniatures so the next guess was RAFM miniatures. And I was right, I found them on the LostMinisWiki ( LINK ):

"RAFM originally released this Orcs series as "Legions of Darkness" and they were part of RAFM's "The World of Repauria" setting. This range of 25mm figures featured Orcs & Goblins and used product codes in the 3xxx range. All the models were sculpted by Bob Murch apart from the Chaos Goblins by Stephen Koo. In the UK, Portage Miniatures had the rights to manufacture this range. "

Riders of the Retrocalypse

Another unit for the Copper Mountain Army. I had riders from here and there and alltogether they now make up the Horsemen of Copper Mountain. Or as I call them: 'The Riders of the Retrocalypse'.

Some Essex miniatures, some RAFM barbarians (see last post), Excalibur dragon riders on Essex horses, knights from Nemo Miniatures...and the guy in front is of unknown origin, his horse is from Essex and his weapon is from... Games Workshop? Reaper? Who cares. He has a big axe, who wants to discuss that?

Only good glue and a great commander can hold these guys together.

By the way, I cover my minis in glossy varnish. I like the look. But it is not easy to photograph them, they are to shiny. Maybe I will change that, it is still possible. I once tried 'Anti Shine' from Army Painter and that worked really good.

Making this picture I realized that I need some backgrounds so that taking photos for the blog will be quicker and easier. That allready was on my 'list', but far in the future. I'm doing this earlier now.

Not that I am really working with a schedule or something. This 'list' is in fact a great amount of numbered (and titled) directorys on my computer related to segments of my projects and in which I collect textfiles, pictures, pdf's, ideas, notes, inspirational material and other informations for a single task or subproject. And a storage for everything that comes in. The numbers are used to produce a - more or less - usefull sequence of tasks.

The numbers of the directories are arranged in steps of 10 so that I can put one or more of them somewhere between two others to move them to a different position. From time to time I re-number all diretories to get the gaps again. Not manually of course, in the filemanger 'Thunar' (Linux) this task is done with a few klicks.

If you are a little bit older - I think (and hope) younger people don't come in touch with it anymore - you may remember this technique from BASIC programming. We sorted our source code like that when BASIC still had line numbers (later there were versions that did not need line numbers any more). 

From the time when men where real men and manuals were real manuals.
Nothing to romanticize, but it was kind of fun. And the manual was great.

I had not planned to do it that way, it came with the process of sorting the stuff I collected. And it works.

So writing unorganized 'Spaghetti Code' a long time ago teached me to organize something else today. Take the good with the bad. The other good part was : If you survived BASIC, you were able to survive nearly every programming language. (My opinion. But please don't start with it today if you seriously want to learn programming, there are better options.)

Self made lances for my Runestone Warriors

The next unit are barbarian warriors from RAFM. They will belong to the army of Runestone which is part of Thule, the land in the north (who would have guessed that?).

I bougth the figures a few years ago and I was curious to find out how old they really are and whether they are still in production. First I looked into old RAFM catalogues and found them in 1989:

The barbarians in the RAFM catalogue of 1989, page 15. A time when miniature companys still had PRINTED catalogues!

As you can see I took no. 3821 and changed it into a lancer. The canadian company RAFM by the way ist still around and so are the barbarians that now have a new label: 'The Norse SAGA'. RAFM by the way offers a lot of interesting miniatures. I will come back to this.

 

The Lances in 10 minutes

Sometimes I feel a sense of stupidity. I have miniatures here that once were sold without weapons and others where the weapons simply disappeared somehow over the years. Or other weapons are needed like shown above. Magically I have a good amout of axes and swords in my bits & pieces box but nearly no lances and spears.

So on one of the last Crisis conventions I ran around like a headless chicken looking for packs of lances. The only ones I found were ridiculously thin pieces made of tin that I bougth although I thought they were way too expensive. 

A failure. They were completely crap because they bent with the slightest touch and became ugly and useless before I even could attach them to the figures. Meanwhile they have gone the way of all flesh : into the melting pot again.

Then, when I finally painted the miniatures, it suddenly was clear that I can make lances by myself: small steel wire rods (diameter ca. 1-1.5 mm) from the garden department of a hardware store (TOOM), clipped to length and made pointed at one end with my little Proxxon machine (a small grinding and drilling machine).

The whole process took barely 10 minutes and this homemade lances don't bend easily and the complete amount below cost only a few cents.

Note to myself: First think about doing it yourself before buying anything.

Oh well, of course I had these 'professional' made metal lances here that came up some years ago. We all thougth they were a great idea. So I once bought a package and after a while got rid of them again. They were spiky like needles! Whenever I reached out for a miniature that was holding a lance I stabbed my hand and very often started bleeding. That was anoying and they had to go. Realism is ok, but that was to much. My home made lances are not that dangerous