I seem to be playing catchup with long abandoned 15mm building projects at the moment. So here is another one!
Several years ago I had a bit of an accident whilst casting one of our advanced buildings. It certainly didn’t turn out as planned. After discovering the house in a box this week I finally got around to having a look at what was beneath the surface of the model.
It came apart quite easily (much of the surface of the building was very thin) revealing – well this. A picture is better than me trying to describe it.
The texture within was far better than I could have hoped for and is certainly very useable.
So what caused it – a lab experiment gone badly wrong, an alien invasion or simply a badly blocked toilet…..?
Against all the odds there has actually been a bit more progress on my little 15mm township. Based on past performance this post is several years ahead of schedule.
The majority of the buildings that I’m planning to use will come from either our Desert Dwellings or Desert Domes ranges. However I thought that it would be interesting to see how easily buildings from our other ranges could be made to fit into the town as well.
The first one that I chose is the Large Garage from our Advanced Buildings – because I like it the best.
As the surface of the garage is quite smooth with rounded corners I wasn’t sure that my approach of using a variety of washes to paint it would work that well. So before anything else it got a spray of textured paint to add a bit more detail to the surface. The paint in question was just something that I found in a local shop. It’s from the Stone range from makeityours.co.uk.
Apparently it gives the “natural look and feel of stone”. I’m not too sure about that but it does give a nice splattered look to the model rather the normal gritty finish of similar sprays.
The rest of the model was mostly bits and bobs from different ranges. The walls are from the 6mm Desert Buildings with part of a JumpGate used as the arch. The two storage containers are tanker wagons from the 6mm monorail sets.
So all in all I’m happy with the results – it fits in nicely with the other buildings. And it didn’t actually take very long – a little over a day from start to finish (again very unusual for me).
We’re back in 15mm again today, with some brand new Hammer’s Slammers vehicles. One of the more memorable stories in the series is Rolling Hot, which deals with the campaign on the planet of Prosperity and particularly the story of Captain June Ranson and the relief of the siege of the city of Kohang by a scratch column of Slammers’ armour. That story can be found in volume two of The Complete Hammer’s Slammers:
A number of different vehicles pop up in the book – the civilian Cyclos we released a month ago come from this particular story. The climax of the tale is a large armoured engagement between the Slammers and a battalion of Prosperity Nationalist light tanks, and our first release of the week is the Colonial Light Tank with a variety of weapon options including light artillery, air defence and a tank destroyer with a remote railgun.
Air Defence
Tank Destroyer
Light Artillery
Also mentioned is a Marine ‘amphibious landing vehicle’ with machine-gun armament. This has resulted in the Pioneer class APC, an amphibious tracked vehicle with a variety of light weapons.
Remote Support Weapon
Remote Tribarrel
Remote Gatling
Missile Launcher
Twin MG Turret
Finally for this week, the Consie Rebels have a powergun on a cruciform mount. It turns out that the standard 8-barrel Calliope mount also fits this base nicely to create a fixed AA weapon.
HS15-3801 – Colonial Light Tank – £8.00 HS15-3801a – Colonial Engineering Tank – £8.25 HS15-3802 – Pioneer Amphibious APC – £8.00 HS15-3803 – Powergun on Cruciform Mount – £4.00 HS15-3803a – Calliope on Cruciform Mount – £4.00
Quite a while ago I painted a house and I was very happy with the results. Buoyed by the success I started on some more.
And then.
Well nothing really. Now obviously in wargaming terms four years between glue and paint is nothing of which to be ashamed. In my defence I did do some painting but struggled to replicate the original test piece. Therefore as often happens the project was pushed to one side and ignored.
And so enter 2020. I’ve actually pulled my finger out and done something with them.
I still wasn’t able to match the look of the first one. Despite using the same technique of using the three pot sets of Foundry paints (base coat of the lightest colour and then subsequent washes of the two darker tones) I seem to have been more heavy handed with the application. This resulted with buildings that had a darker and more grimy feel.
Still as this is the sort of place where you might be able to hire a spaceship with “no questions asked” the darker look is ok.
I’m aiming for slightly less than four years for the next update.
At last, we’re finally in a position to put the last of the releases which were originally planned for Salute (!) onto the website. We hope it’s been worth the wait…
Our 15mm Yenpalo Aliens have been mainly an infantry-based force, and had just the single vehicle, the Xarledi grav tank, which was released (and sold out on the day) at Salute 2017. This balance has now been redressed with this release. There are four new vehicles – light tank, APC, scout and troop carrier vehicles, more Xarledi variants plus heavy guns, infantry variants and skimmers.
Ssetzu Air Defence
Infantry Skimmers
Kjalba Heavy Gun
Xarledi Light Support
Xarledi Air Defence
Xarledi Missile Support
Since these models were intended to be part of our Salute set, we’re going to extend the combined discount and charity donation that applied to all of the other releases. All of the new Yenpalo releases will initially be discounted by 7.5%, and for each sale we’ll also donate the same amount to HEROES, a charity set up to help frontline NHS staff as they battle the Covid-19 outbreak. This will run until August 21st.
Today we have a bunch of assorted 15mm bits and pieces added to the website. There are several engineering vehicles based around the engineering kits we released recently (we will do more but it’s a matter of getting them built, painted and photographed!).
Fauchard Engineering Vehicle
Kopis Engineering Vehicle
Catapult Engineering Vehicle
We have a PacFed gun crew for our various towed and fixed guns.
There’s a new weapon option for the Catapult 6×6 AFV with a remote anti-tank weapon.
In the Hammer’s Slammer range the Stewart Regiment have their own 15mm page to make ordering easier, and they’ve also gained a pack of remote guns plus a control team which features in the Stewart Borderers detachment list.
As models go our very first 15mm building (B15-1001 – bunker) is particularly awkward to paint. It has a smooth and rounded surface. You can’t really dry brush it as it doesn’t have any edges to highlight. There are no nooks and crannies so a wash won’t work. It just has nowhere to settle. So what to do with it?
Well I decided to cover one in mud. Sort of anyway.
The mud in question came from Games Workshop’s Technical paint range. I’d never really looked at their various different basing paints until recently. I’d always just assumed that they were just little pots of paint with sand mixed in. Whilst this is the case for some, others are designed to give the effect of dried and cracked mud. After watching a couple of videos demonstrating the paints I thought that they might look good smeared over a bunker (as you do).
They come in a variety of colours and I settled on Agrellan Earth. Although the actual colour didn’t really matter as it was going to be painted over anyway.
Because of the size of the area to be covered the paint has to be applied in a very thick layer. My first effort simply ended up as a layer of brown paint with no cracking. It really needs to be slapped on – I ended up using around two thirds of the pot.
A few areas didn’t give a very good result at first and needed a second coat.
Initially the surface was a little bit delicate but once painted everything seemed robust.
The bunker was simply painted with Games Workshop shades and contrast paints over a white undercoat.
After a bit of trial and error I settled on two coats of the Skeleton Hoard contrast paint and one coat of the Seraphim Sepia wash. Then finished off with a dry brush of Terminatus Stone.
I’m rather pleased with the results. It certainly gives a different look to the bunker and makes it a lot less dull and boring compared to my earlier efforts.
And to finish – an overhead view. Hopefully it does blend in a little bit with the surrounding terrain.
After a busy few weeks we’re finally back on an even keel, and one facet of this is we can get back to releasing new stuff. We’re starting with some new 15mm vehicles, but nothing conventional. We’ve wanted to do some civilian vehicles for a while, but since there are other companies that already produce some very good models we didn’t want to go over the ground they’ve already covered. So we were looking for something a bit different, and John Treadaway pointed us in the direction of one of the Hammer’s Slammers stories in which mention is made of Cyclos, described as
a three-wheeled mini-truck of the sort the civilians on Prosperity used for
everything from taxis to hauling farm produce into town.
So we had something to work on that would also fit nicely into one of the Hammer’s Slammers detachment lists (Prosperity Rebels, which will be reworked to fit them in).
We can up with a number of variants – open- and closed-back trucks for hauling farm produce as described above, a taxi, an armed versions (the rebels in the story have a mortar mounted in the back of one), a police version and a tow truck.
The armed version can carry either a mortar or a twin buzzbomb launcher (same weapons as the M6 Combat Car). The police version has a light bar and one of our standard small turret rings, so could be fitted with just about any small turret or weapon mount from one of our lighter vehicles (the Cyclos are quite small so many of the larger turrets will overwhelm it). The default version comes with a hatch and pintle weapon but it could carry a weapon such as the Indonesian remote MG, a Neo-Soviet tri-barrel, Lightning Division gatling, Shinigami missile launcher etc. We’ve included a number of these as options on the website but feel free to drop us a line if you have any ideas for other options you’d like to see.
As any fan of 80s UK TV comedy shows will understand, the closed back van version just has to be painted dirty yellow, and I only just resisted the temptation to paint ‘Trotters Independent Trading Co, New York – Paris – Peckham’ down the side (or as John pointed out, in the future it should probably be ‘New New York – New Paris – New Peckham’ !).
The Brigadier inspects cyclos in the car park of a fast food joint.
I repeat: we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
According to my Google timeline, I spent >55 hours at the workshop last week, plus another ten yesterday. I’m knackered. But the upshot is that we’re back up to date with orders, and hopefully from now on we should be back to our normal turnaround time.
While I’ve been wrestling with the backlog, Phil has been busy making moulds so we have at least five week’s worth of new releases lined up and ready to go, with as many again (possibly more) masters sitting waiting to be cleaned up for moulding. As we mentioned in the previous post, a number of these are 15mm Sci-Fi, and I’m hoping to get some of these on the website at the end of this week – exactly what that comprises depends on how well I get on with producing stock this week. It’ll be one of these (click on them for larger versions) …
Today we have three very useful 15mm accessory packs. The first is a conversion kit for creating engineering or recovery vehicles, consisting of a crane and a dozer blade (which can be one of three types). It also has a converter so that it will fit either of our standard turret ring sizes. We’ve made up several example vehicles showing what can be done with the pack.
The other packs contain respectively one each of the three dozer blades, or two recovery cranes.
We also sell a pack of two smaller cranes (from the Hammer’s Slammers E8 recovery vehicle). These have non-standard turret rings, so the pack now includes converter rings so that they will fit our standard small turret rings, and plates so that they can be fitted to a flat surface such as a truck bed.
