Ooooooh...

... shiny! Literally.

The great re-barracking of the tin men continues. And today's column included these 100% Old School, Shiny, Imagi-nation, Seven Years War lite, types:

Mortar, with Revell SYW gunners.

 

 Field gun; Revell figures.



 

Heavier kit, with a mix of Spencer Smith and Revell figures.

Scratch built caisson.

 

Spencer Smith horse.

 

Shinyyyyyy!!



Old...

... friends.

Ross Mac in a comment on my last post sympathised with my current task of moving hundreds of figures from one barracks to the next, saying how much fun it would be to handle figures that haven't been on the table top of glory for a while. And how right he was ! This morning, I moved another few hundred, and met up with many an old sweat in 28mm from the war in America.

 

Including these Perry figures:

Jaegers. And how fine they are, how fine! Animated to pefection. The only pity is that one can't really have too many of the splendid foresters in one's army.

 

But, there were also these favourites:

 

Loyal and true. And so forgotten in the Old Country. In fact, I wrote a letter only this past week objecting to some television 'historian' who claimed, in The Spectator magazine, that 'we', i.e., Britain, fought the American war all on our own ! Pah!!.

And:

some 'Light Bobs' to lend a hand.

 

 



But not forgetting the opposition, sadly deluded, estranged from their King. But, we have forgiven them, for, as Bismarck realised, our common language would be a deciding factor in the history of the world. And, when, like ancient Rome, we are gone, and our cities and countryside inhabited by others, our tongue will survive for a while. Here and there, like the inheritors of old, small kings will try to maintain the old ways, embodied in our language. Our English.

 

All of this, of course, means that I will have to order some more of these fellows. Of course I don't have enough!

Heavy...

Lift...

Well, first things first. I've added the Waterloo Italian Army figures to the various bits of Italian Western Desert kit. Unfortunately, although they are a reasonable scale match, being open-topped and open-sided, I was unable to fit the figures into the driving compartments of the trucks. The only way to manage that would have been to hack off the figures' legs - but that would have been too obvious. So, I went for an at rest, on overwatch type 'look'. See what you think:

On the plus side, this unit of Breda 20mm truck mounted artillery looks a lot loss forlorn and abandoned than before.

I wonder, does the Italian fondness for truck mounted artillery (something they pioneered in the Great War) mean that they were the first 'technicals', now so common in Africa and Iraq?

Now, the 'heavy lift' of this post's title. A good deal of my wargames stuff is now housed in the Hobbit Bunker-Shed (see previous posts about the 'Jotul' stove), but I have a large, heavy, glass-fronted Ikea cabinet that contains several hundred figures, some tanks, houses, and books, rulesets etc in the sole downstairs room of my 1930s terrace house (we live small in Old England, crowded as we are). Recently, I had an Anglo-Canadian guest here, from Windsor, Ontario. She was surprised by both the tiny size of my house and its monetary value, around £200,000. She lives in a large, century-old Canadian house worth around Can$70,000. Canada = big country, small population, big house, low price. Sounds good to me! The Ikea wargames cabinet is slowly subsiding, as a floor joist has given way. So, it and all the figures will have to be moved to the Hobbit Bunker-Shed. It may take some time. The first move began his evening:

 

East Africa. German fellows, auxiliaries/volunteers, seamen from the SMS Konigsberg, and the famous askari.

 

Also some of the oppo. - British and South African infantry, lus Belgian Force Publique:

Quite a few of them:

But there's more where they came from:



 

I'm not looking forward to this...

Old school...

... charm. And nostalgia.

Just over a month ago I was visiting my aged mother (born in the year of the British General Strike) in Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway. This is a surprisingly remote area of South-West Scotland, jutting out (down?) into the Irish Sea, and not that far from the Isle of Man (a fine place, a place I hope to return to ). Wigtown is famous for being part of the Beltie belt, for its martyrs drowned at the stake (although that may well be a myth), and, since the 1990s as 'Scotland's National Book Town'. And a pretty damn remote one too! I suspect the internet has enabled the 'Book Town' to survive longer than it might have. Oddly (right, I'm rambling. It's the vino!). Oddly,  at the time that the whole book town idea was kicking off, I was a frequent contributor of fine short stories (if I may take a lead from Prime Minister Cameron and avoid bashfulness) to the Scottish Book Collector, whose editor, Jennie Renton, was a moving spirit behind the whole project. So, this small town (popln.: 1,000) boasts a rather large number of second hand bookshops. And a fine plant nursery. So, as I fulfill my filial duties, I can also inhale the fine, dusty odours of old books, and peer at noble plants within the confines of an 18th Century walled garden. And, a month ago, my book haul was full of old school charm, including:

Oh, the delight! Do you see the fine line drawing, and the price - 2/6d, a half crown ! A half crown! I have waxed lyrical before about that noble and useful coin of the realm, finer even than the tanner or the thrupenny bit. Joy. Sadness. Days that are past. Anyway, it is a digest sized Ian Allen book, nicely illustrated with pretty clear photographs and sharp, succinct text. Also:

the back cover has a nice 'Keil Kraft' advert. Every summer as a boy I used to buy one or two balsa kit aircraft (rubber band powered) and carefully build them before flying them from the top of an old sandstone quarry near my home. Nose dives were pretty common, but then I had the pleasure of using offcuts of balsa to repair the damage before returning to the quarry. I shall visit the quarry once more, and the hill where it is, before I die (D.V.).

Aircraft of World War 1 also has a section on'Lighter-than-air machines'. It is concise, but nicely illustrated, and took me back to when my son was a nipper and we made reasonably frequent trips to the old RNAS (?) airship station at East Fortune, which is now the major Scottish air museum.

Of course, all this stringbag type stuff means I have to:

Glue something old.

Europhilia...

... sounds nasty. But then, we also have Europhobia. Not to mention the madness of humanity (I can feel the appeal of the bells as I get older).

Anyway, more wit and wisdom, or rot and drivel, from the pen/keyboard of Herr Doktor Alf R Ont can be found here

It's got a, sort of, Very British Civil War flavour about it:

What Is...

... To Be Done?

Not in the sense of Lenin's 1902 pamphlet of the same name. That was, of course, yet another step along the broad way to the genocidal hell that was much of the twentieth century. Instead, I asked the same question of myself this evening in respect of my innocent, child-like, kit bashing, toy soldierly past-times. After cogitating, I came, I think to an answer in the shape of these empty, forlorn, abandoned-looking vehicles:

Being various wargame Italian kit, including some captured British kit. A while ago I had lamented my lack of suitable crew figures, and was directed, by El Cake Tin, to these:

The two shall join in holy matrimony.

Valom..!

Valom! For some reason that sounds like a Hebrew word for 'Zoom!' Do comics in Israel feature IDF aircraft flying low and fast over the Sinai with 'VALOM!!' printed next to them?

Actually, as any fool knows, Valom is a Czech (is it?) manufacturer of short run kits. Short run kits of interesting subjects. Interesting subjects to catch silly old kit bashers with poor eyesight and declining modelling skills. Chaps like me, in fact. And the interesting subject ? The Caproni Campini N.1. In 1940, the International Aeronautical Federation (FAI - French, you see), registered the Caproni Campini N.1 as the world's first jet aircraft. Actually, the cunning Jerries had already flown the He 178, but didn't tell anyone! The cads! Further, the Caproni wasn't a true jet, but, rather, flew using the ducted fan idea. But, enough of all that, and onto the kit:

Heavy, thick plastic, no location pins, fitted where it touched, and seen here at an early stage:

Despite the larding of filler seen above, I had to return with the green stuff again, and, eventually, finish it off with a combination of superglue and tippex as filler. And even then it wasn't right! The kit also came with a nice little fret of etched brass for the cockpit, but it was clear that none of it would be seen once the fuselage was closed up, so I saved myself the aggravation of sticking etched brass to my fingers.

 

 

Finally, I did produce something like the prototype:

Photographs of the original (there were two, plus a non-flying version for engine testing) show it as being pretty worn, and that's the finish I attempted.

 

As you can see, below, it was a pretty hefty bit of kit, and is actually a good deal bigger than the Me109G-6 I've posed it with here:

Right, that's it on short-runs for a while. I need an old style (1970s-1990s) kit, with no fiddly bits!