Gunboat for Aboukir - Preparing our 2017 Tactica game...

Since our bloggosphere fellow Miles presented some lasercut kits from Laserdreamworks during the last painting challenge, I've been strolling around the 28mm ships Matthew Green and his team are offering. Lately my friend Bernhard and me were pondering about our Tactica 2017 game and I got roped into preparing some more boats too easily. Our game will address the British landing at Aboukir in 1801 and of course we'd like to have more than the two rowing boats we brought to Hamburg last year. However that brought me back to Laserdreamworks and made their kits even more seducing. Well... 'Landing at Aboukir' implies that we'll not likely present whole Neptun's ocean but a piece of the shallow Aboukir bay and a piece of its sandy coastline of course. So the larger ships dropped out and I went for one of those rather small gunboats.

The kit is based on an improved design by Commisioner Hamilton from 1806 or 1808 but it's well reported that the British employed larger ships than rowing boats at Aboukir before. Unfortunately I'm not au fait enough with naval history to explain the different types of tenders Royal Navy ships carried along during the Age of Sail but as far as I know from different pictures a launch of this gunboats size seems plausible.

Conversion pieces - Press moulding with 'Instant Mold'

About five and a half months until Tactica 2017 in Hamburg. This time our club is preparing a Napoleonic game featuring the British landing operation at Aboukir in 1801. Although my friend Bernhard has overall control over the project I'm glad to take part in it and to contribute some humble pieces. After all there'll be one or two rowing boats, a larger gunboat and about 50 foot figures from yours truly meaning that I really have to start preparing and painting the stuff.

With the gunboat I'm on a good way as you'll see in a later post but with the infantry units I'm more or less in the starting blocks. As revealed earlier this week there'll be a highly converted unit of British Redcoats from my workbench. For that I'm using different plastics sets by Perry Miniatures to create rather early Napoleonic uniform variations. Namely some chaps with trumplines, overalls and stovepipe shakos. Since I didn't want to use all the trumplines from the AWI sets I needed to find a way to reproduce some of pieces. Unfortunately my sculpting skills are very limited so I turned my efforts to Instant Mold:

Instant Mold is a clear material which looks slightly like hot glue. At room temperature it's rather solid with only little flexibility. But exposed to higher temperatures it becomes very soft and flexibel. This way it is useful to create simple moulds to reproduce roughly two dimensional pieces like shields, structured surfaces and such. Anyway I wanted to have trumplines so I tried some more complex one piece moulds...

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...

Shrubbery from Rubberised Horsehair

A while ago our fellow Dave presented an excellent tutorial about making hedgerows out of rubberised horshair. Actually it's a stuff from upholstery business but in the days of disposable low-budget furniture and synthetic padding it's pretty unusual. Due to this I foundered on acquiring this stuff until Dave kindly and generously sent me some of his clippings. Actually a pretty large amount of horsehair so I'll be able to tart my NWF collection up with enough shrubbery for a medium sized battlefield. Many thanks again, Dave!

Finally during those holiday weeks I managed to try working with the stuff and prepared a couple of test pieces myself. 

1.) Bases:

As most of us I have a pretty large amount of those green plastic bases which are supplied with the Perry plastics. Now I found a proper use for them and employed a couple of them as bases for my shubbery test pieces. For this I simply unsprued a couple of them and rounded the edges. Not perfect but sufficient for test pieces. For the real terrain pieces of course the shape should be much more irregular.

Back from holiday - Workbench snapshot

Ten days by the sea went by in a flash!

The family and me were in East Frisia since 11th August and spent a wonderful time of temporal deceleration there. The weather was rather fine and we enjoyed a couple of excellent day trips with the kids: Bicycle rides, a short cruise trip and a trip to the German shipping museum in Bremerhaven for example. About the last one I'll spread a couple of words here.

But now back to the workbench!

While we were on holiday my kit of a Hamilton gunboat by Laser Dreamworks arrived and I was very happy to find it on our doorstep just. So this MDF beauty will be one of the next pieces on my workbench. Nevertheless there is the next batch of NWF British to be finished before the ship:

As you see they are nearly finished but they need some highlights here and there and some finishing touches. Most probably I'll be able to present them later this week.

Until then enjoy your weekend !