That’s All, Folks !

So the last part of our sale is all done and dusted … and what a sale it’s been ! September is normally a very slow month, no-one has any money after their summer holidays and it’s generally rather quiet on the order front. Not this time. In the last nine days we’ve taken more than double what we’d normally expect for the whole of an average September ! This is a fantastic response to our sale and I guess shows that we must be doing something right. We’ve already had to order in extra supplies of metal and resin to cope with the volume of casting we’ll need to do.

It means that we’re now going to be incredibly busy picking and packing all of these orders and doing any necessary casting ! It will mean that there could be a slightly (EDIT – for slightly, read quite a lot…) longer turnaround than usual on orders, especially larger ones or ones with lots of resin models in (we sold a lot, and I mean a LOT, or our 6mm and 15mm desert buildings). This will probably have a knock-on effect at SELWG where we won’t have time to produce as much stock for the show as we would have liked, so if you’re after any buildings that day it’ll probably be best to pay us an early visit. We also have some new-style 6mm buildings that we were hoping to get out for the show, but they may have to wait until afterwards now (they’re the start of an SF-city range – I’ll preview them on the blog later this week).

What I will bring you this morning is some previews of other new stuff; a new parcel of 3D printed buildings in 15mm, 6mm and 2mm scales turned up this weekend (eventually … the UPS driver managed to leave it in someone else’s rubbish bin on the other side of town, but that’s a long story …). As mentioned above I’ll leave the 6mm buildings for later in the week since they need a little bit of cleaning and assembly work on them first.

The first model is a 15mm version of our 6mm-scale vehicle garage, of which we sell lots and lots so it makes sense to have it in the larger scale as well. The door has been printed in a high-detail material which contrasts with the rough surface of the building.

The rest of this morning’s previews are all in 2mm scale as part of our Land Ironclads range. This batch concentrates mainly on various fortifications, with the odd lighthouse thrown in. First we have the largest of the 2mm models, Fort Boyard (or Bouyard) which is off the west coast of France in the Bay of Biscay. It’s better known as the site of a TV game show, but was in fact built in Napoleon’s time (well, started anyway – it wasn’t finished until 1857). It’s large (as 2mm models go) so will go into production as a resin casting.

The next image is a pair of Martello Towers. These are a common site around the UK coast, but the design was taken from a Genovese tower at Mortella Point on Corsica; in typical British fashion we took the design but got the spelling wrong ! Not all towers are the same, this image shows a couple of different types, with either a single gun or a second design with a clover-leaf style arrangement of three gun positions.

The third fortification is a very small fortification, Fort Vauville, on Normandy’s west coast. This unprepossessing building isn’t much more than a stone house with a surrounding defensive wall, so much so that when I walked around it on holiday I didn’t notice it – I just thought it was a holiday home with a big stone wall around it ! I was more interested in the WW2-era bunkers scattered around the same beach.

Switching from fortifications to more peaceful structures, we have a small lighthouse. This is based on the Little Red Lighthouse on the Hudson River in New York, but at this scale could just be a small generic lighthouse anywhere in the world.

Finally, we have a daymark – these are a bit like lighthouses, but without the light, and are used for navigation during daylight hours. This one is based on Gribben Tower in Cornwall. (As Phil pedantically pointed out, surely a lighthouse without a light is just a house !?)

This marks the beginning of what will hopefully be a major expansion in our 2mm scenics and buildings range. As well as fortifications we have villages, farms, factories all planned (the first of these have already been ordered from the printer and more are about to be).