What to do next?

Now quite a lot of the wargame bloggers have told us what they are starting on the work bench for this month September. Well I have never gone down that road as it would take me more than a month to finish the list. In fact it would take me more than a year. So with the near completion of the Prussian Dragoons what is on my too do list.

Well I have been looking at my long list of figures to paint and I have now decided to paint the 1^st Carabiniers of the French army. The figures are from Italeri and although I have painted figures in cream, grey light blue and tan plastic, never have I painted figures in silver before? Well as long as the prepping is done well, I do not really see them as a problem to paint these I hope.

Now doing some research on these, I still find that lots of people have lots of opinions to what uniform they were wearing on that day at Waterloo. Some say they had all white tunics and trousers while others say blue, some even say blue tunics and grey trousers. I will still do some digging around on this as I am not going to start painting these until I have finished the Prussian dragoons.

UPDATE

It has been a while since my last post but the good news is that I have finished the last batch of horses for the 8^th Prussian Dragoons which means that all 18 are now finished. On the other hand I have also completed the second batch of troopers and have started the last batch of six. It now means that I have completed a total of 30 figures so far this year and it’s the best I have done over the last three years. I still have to finish off the two Prussian Artillery members the Officer and drummer and the second batch of Prussian Landwehr.

My spending on the hobby has really taken off this year. My brother has picked up the last derelict farm building for me from Hornby in Margate, Kent which was the farm house itself. With another two tins of paint and a roll of non-slip mat for a project I hope to start soon.

Now that summer is over, although the hot weather looks set for another week, it means that I will have more time for my hobby or does it?

News from the Front

Today Hat Have said that two sets of Napoleonic figure are “Moving up the queue”, what that means I have no idea, but maybe they will be shipped out before Christmas?

The two sets are French Line Infantry of 1815 period which is very good news.

Good in the sense that there are a new set of French Infantry figures coming out as it’s been a long time since the old Airfix set came out. I did not like the Italeri set much as they looked a bit skinny and they are now hard to find.Now I do love my Airfix regiments and I still have two more boxes waiting to be painted up as the 3^rd and 4^th Fusiliers regiments.

In the Hat box 8294 they are all marching and they contain two elite figures on each spur. With this they have four different backpacks to choose from and some head swaps added.

The other set, 8295 is the Line Infantry Command set. This has two officers on foot with one holding the flag, while we have one on horseback. There is also a drummer and two NCO’s. All look very good although we are just seeing the drawings of the two sets at the moment. Well I have now got to get my finger out and start painting faster.

3000 Hits?

What a nice surprise today to see that I have now had over 3000 hits on my blog. That makes it over 1000 hits in just 4 months. Can we get to 4000 by the end of the year? Well only time will tell on that.

If you regularly look at my blog then I would like to thank you very much in taking a look now and then. I have tried to put a little bit of information up each month so it is slowly growing. The plan to take some pictures of my little army and hoping that the weather is going to be kind to me failed as we had a very wet summer still I hope to be able to do so this weekend.

Although my painting has once again nearly at a standstill, I must admit that time is always against me with work and home life. Still as I have said before, I am still managing to do bits here and there. So keep looking and once again a big Thank you for taking time to looking in and making an old man very happy.

How it all started for me - Part Four

We had to wait for another three years before two more Napoleonic Waterloo set’s came out of the Airfix stable in 1975 and they were the French Imperial Guard which for the first time came out in a grey plastic and the Prussian Landwehr infantry, made in a blue plastic.

These were the very last set’s to come from Airfix as there was a decline in sales on all of their kits. Even after all these years I still think that these were the best we ever got from Airfix in that the detail was better and largely free of flash. I remember buying two Imperial Guard boxes and three Prussian but it was very sad that they never continued with the Waterloo series when the hobby started to take off again in the 90’s.

It was in the late 70’s that I started to get into wargaming again and started to paint my Airfix figures with the old Airfix paints. First I started with the French Line 1^st and 2^nd Fusilliers and then the 1^st and 7^th Curassiers. In those days I only had the books from the local library to get the information that I needed about the colours of the uniforms by looking at the pictures but even after all this time, today I still have these in my ranks. So started a long and painful years of painting my Waterloo armies on and off when the mood took me. 

In 1978 while I was serving on the tenants association and a question came up about the use of the estates community hall. At that time little was going on in the hall except for a play group during the day and a judo class one night a week. This got me thinking about running my own wargaming club and with the approval of the tenants association my idea was put into action. A monthly newsletter from the tenants association was sent out with news of the wargaming club. It started life as the Coldbath Military Modelling Club as the committee wanted a more wider appeal to the club and not just kids playing war!

So on a cold Monday night on the 20th November 1978 we started our very first club night. We had just five people that walked through the door at 7pm and the night really was just to get too know one another and what we hoped to do in the club. That year we had just three meetings.

In the following year the club changed its name as the committee had now stopped meeting. On the 2^nd July 1979 I changed the name to the Coldbath Wargaming Association. (C.W.A) We had a total of 23 names on our books and we had a total of 42 meetings. In March I made a club magazine called “ATTACK” and sold 11 copies to the members. I published a total of 10 issues that year. We had our own tuck-shop for drinks and snacks and even had some raffles giving, Books, Figures, Terrain and model kits as prizes. Also in March I started our GENERALS TABLE. This was a club competition where it was all about playing little battles over a period between Jan-Nov and winning points in the games. Our very first winner was Tom Casey picking up the very first trophy. We went on our first club outing to SELWG show at the old Grove Park HQ in South-East London.