Converted Napoleonics WIP

Yesterday evening I had another very pleasant video chat with Dave and Martin during which I kept working on my conversion unit for our Egypt 1801 game at Tactica 2017:

Work in progress

Basically I'm using the Perry Napoleonic British plastics as well as their AWI sets for British and Continental infantry. Those combined give the figures themselves in somehow unusual poses. For our presentation game I wanted to create something special so those and some additional chaps will form a unit which takes a small rest after the exhausting landing at Aboukir. Alan Perry himself inspired me to this conversion project with a Facebook post he published lately.

But a view conversions have to be made to make them credible:

Since the Napoleonic figures have the post-1805 trotter backpack I decided to remove its straps and add a trumpline instead. From my personal point of view that gives them a kind of early war look. Pretty useful for 1801.

Anyway since the cartridge boxes and the water bottles are part of the trotter piece I needed to cut them from the backpack and glue them directly onto the figure.

Luckily the remaining parts of the 1808-1815 figures work rather well because the stovepipie shakos was worn in Egypt as were such trousers or overalls.

On the other hand I didn't want to use 24 trumplines and leave all the AWI troopers without baggage. Thus I decided to make some of the parts I needed by myself. To accomplish this I used an incredible stuff called 'Instant Mold'. Very useful but more on that in another post.

The figures above are pretty much finished but I need to add the shoulder tufts for center companies. Currently I'm not sure how to add flank company soldiers. Most probably I'm not able to sculpt the shoulder wings myself so I'll need to work around that somehow...