Sarissa precision Horsa glider

Unfortunately, having a 3 three year old in the house, and having to work from home (I'm a teacher) isn't giving me quite the time that other people seem to have to work on their hobby during the coronavirus lockdown, but actually, I'm OK with that. If I was doing it all day every day I would burn out! That said, I do have a few updates that I should have been putting on here, so now is a good time to do so.

My first one is putting together a horsa glider for a British airborne force for Bolt Action, or maybe Chain of Command if I ever get around to buying the rulebook...

The glider itself is the 1/56 MDF and card kit from Sarissa Precision. I approached this with no small level of trepidation, as I find MDF kits need quite a bit of working to get them looking good, and this was by far the most complicated laser-cut kit that I have tackled.
And indeed, it was tricky, but not overly so. I have been using Roket card glue to put it together rather than PVA, and I think this has been a lifesaver. If I had had to brace things while waiting for PVA I may have lost it and just binned the damn thing altogether.

First you assemble to cockpit, and then the main fuselage of the glider begins with putting support rings around a central floor.

I made a couple of slight mistakes, both made by not paying attention to the precise order of the instructions. My advice for this kit is to do things in exactly the order you are instructed to! I have to chop a piece off the central support for the cockpit, and prise apart the second from top fuselage ring in the picture above as the lugs didn't line up. Thankfully neither of these issues were sufficient to screw the build up entirely.

The door was another tricky moment, and required pulling apart. Due to the way the hinges work, you need to assemble it attached to the fuselage. Again though, not the end of the world.
My biggest bugbear with the kit, however, is the score marks in the skin. It's an impressive piece of design work, but I definitely did not want those lines across the finished model. So, I did a little research and took an idea from the chap over at wargamesandrailroads (whose Horsa build can be found here) and covered the bugger in diall pre-mixed filler.

I applied it as smoothly as I could with my finger, and then sanded it down with some fine grit sandpaper... and it's not come out too bad. Fairly smooth, and I think I applied it thick enough that I didn't end up sanding the card itself.  I've chucked on some Galeria black acrylic paint as that filler would have just soaked up spray primer;

and I think she's looking fairly sexy. There was a huge gap between the wings and the fuselage, so I've filled that in too, but at the expense of being able to fully disassemble the model. This is going to be a sod to store now, but a good looking model > storeability in my opinion.

I still need to detail the interior of the ramp a little, and maybe make some extensions so the ramp comes down the floor, but other than that I think she's ready to take some paint! This has gone on the backburner for the moment, though, as I need to get some masking tape, and bottles of the right colours, so in the meantime I have been painting up the finishing models for my British force, and the non-rank and file elements of the Germans.
My next post will be showing off the brits, and I'll wait until I have something more interesting than rank and file for the Germans before I post them up.
I also have plans in the works for a dark ages pallisade and Strathclyde Welsh warband for Saga, so plenty to keep me occupied while the world is going to hell!

British transports and a club visit

Yet again, these have taken me way longer than they should have. I initially wanted to get them finished before I went to Broadside but the best laid plans gang aft agley, eh?

First up are the two little universal carriers, and I mean little. I was surprised at quite how tiny these models are, and also at how damn long they take to paint. Part of that is the fact that they have 8 crew between them, so it's not just painting two vehicles, it's painting almost another entire squad
Not much of note here really, except the decision to make one of the carriers crew into Polish airborne. I was umming and ahhing over red or green berets, and then I spoke to a Polish colleague at work the other day, who told me about her father who escaped Poland to join the British army, and then couldn't go home until 1989 due to the communist regime there threatening his life. I had to include some Polish in my army after hearing that. Plus I really like the idea of some diversity in this army. Painting caucasian skin every single time starts to feel a bit samey after the 90th figure, so grey berets happened to salve my liberal bleeding heart.

Only one decent picture of these, unfortunately. I was taking the photos outside with my back to the sun, and I didn't consider my own shadow...

Next up is a warlord M5 half track. Bought because it's a little more historically accurate for a british army, but I must say it was a pig to put together and the tracks had so much flash you have to practically carve some shape back into them. If I was to make another, I'd go with the plastic m3 kit instead. For the sake of a battery box and a few other details it's not worth the hassle.
I wanted a lot of stowage on this and still might hang a few more bits on the side to break up the profile and the lines of stowage thing I've got going on, but it's serviceable for now and I want to get the damnable thing off my desk for a while. I also want to convert some passengers for it so it doesn't look so empty, and I have a spare sprue left over from the British starter box to do it with, but again that's a task for another time. The stowage is all from Warlord except the roll of camo net which I made myself from medical guaze.

Alongside actually getting stuff finished, I have also been out and played some games. I went to the Maidstone Wargames Society open day yesterday, and had a good game of Lion Rampant on a beautiful board depicting Sluys in the Netherlands during the hundred years war, all made by Stephen from the club. I was keen to play this game as the board and figures were awesome, but also because I have a copy of The Pikeman's Lament which I intend to use for ECW skirmishes in 28mm, and I wanted to give the rules a try as it is based on LR. It's a fantastic ruleset, really easy to pick up and easy to modify. Perfect, really.
The scenario was a fictitious one where the English had to burn the four thatched buildings in the centre of the table, and I as the French had to defend them. It was a close result despite a wobbly start that would probably have been less close if my rolling had been anything other than atrocious all game, especially with regards to reloading and firing the my cannon, but I made the English work for their victory so I was happy. I could also have used the boast element to my advantage a bit more, but I didn't know the system so I'll call it a good first game despite the loss.

The board at the start of the action, including a lot of lovely vignettes and peasant models.

Ignore my ugly ass and weird hand angle and look at the pretty ships. Credit for this photo goes to MWS.

I also played a little FoG, talked Badgers and Burrows (I think it was called) with a guy from the Milton Hundred, and chatted a bit about Gaslands (the rulebook for which has dropped through my letterbox as I have been typing this!). Overall, a great morning out and I'll definitely be going back as the club plays a lot of the games that I am currently interested in taking up.

British artillery observation officer

As a little light relief from the other, larger projects on the bench at the moment, I painted these little chaps, the artillery observation team from Warlord. As you get a free A.O.O. for your Brits in Bolt Action, I thought I had better add one to the army as the first order of business after finishing the British starter set.

Really nice metals, quite a lot of flash on the guy with the binoculars, not all of which I managed to get (there's still some on the back of the Sten gun, quite a lot actually, but I've tried to camouflage it as well as I can). I find this is always a problem with me and metals, for some reason my eyes just don't register that flash and mold lines as well as I do on plastic and I always find some weird knobbles when I'm halfway through painting something.

First up, the officer himself...

As always, the camera has picked up some little bits that need touching up. This guy is a lovely model, but very tall in comparison to the warlord plastics, and this is compounded by him having a really thick tab on the base. To mitigate this problem a little I have placed all three of these guys on the plastic recessed Warlord bases instead of my usual 2p sized bases from Warbases, and it does help to bring them down to a slightly more regular height.

You can probably also see here that I don't paint eyes on my miniatures, just a little strip of dark brown. I know an eye adds a lot, but it's a huge pain to do, and I'm not aiming for my miniatures to win any painting prizes, so what's the point? I just want a good looking army done, and this is just one of the shortcuts I take to make sure I actually finish things. A slightly half-arsed but complete model is better to me than not finishing it because I let my ambition overrun my time.

This chap is my favourite, very simple design, but very clean and very enjoyable to paint. I've just spotted that I need to go back and do his canteen in the correct colour. Sod it. Oh well, off I go...

Sarissa Precision English timber-framed farmhouse.

My current project is WW2 Europe. This is partially because most of the non-40k specific terrain I have is from my previous SAGA efforts, and consists largely of fields, woodland, river, and some bogs, most of which should be completely reusable for this theatre as well. The grub huts and long houses however, probably won't be quite as suitable. To remedy this, I decided I need a small farm as I have plans to work through the scenarios in the Battleground Europe Bolt Action theatre book. I looked at various options, including scratchbuilding one, but considering that I hadn't scratch built anything larger than a fence since my teenage years I felt that I should buy an MDF one and detail it instead.

I decided on one of Sarissa's English timber framed farmhouses. I felt that the style of building was fairly common throughout Europe, not just England, and with a few tweaks and a bit of hand waving it could pass for pretty much anywhere on the western front. I've also frequently had daydreams about an ECW project so I may as well have one eye on multitasking the building in the future. Anyway, I bought one for the paltry sum of £15 (they can be found here; https://www.sarissa-precision.com/Farmhouse/p1603368_14211456.aspx) and set to work. I removed the paper from a load of foamboard, clad the house in the resulting foam sheet, and set to work with ruler, coffee stirrers stolen en masse from my local mega-corp coffee house, and a tube of gel superglue.

I tried to keep a lot of the original details, such as the brickwork, from being lost under the cladding by scribing it into the foam, but reduced the number of timbers because it was making it look a bit crowded. I also decided not to replicate the curved timbering, not only because it would be a complete pain in the arse to do, but also because curved timbering is actually a pretty rare feature (but mainly because it would be a pain in the arse). I almost replaced it with some diagonal beams, but decided not to for the sake of a simple life.

In an attempt to get as many different levels or layers into the facade as I could, I decided that the doors needed to be brought forwards a bit as they sat very deep, and at the same level as the windows, so a few small offcuts of wood were used to bring them outwards a bit.

My accidental attempt a noir-ish chiaroscuro effect.

This fugly solution does start to preclude any detailing inside the building, but I've decided against going all out on the interior anyway. (This is partly because I am sure that the Mrs would start making loud and derogatory comments about why I was playing with a dolls house. She's delightful like that, is the Mrs.) I'd rather have it empty and playable than littered with chairs and suchlike, and there is no way on earth I am crazy enough to start building stairs to fit inside. Not yet, anyway.

My first attempt at tiling the roof using individually cut shingles looked cartoony as the tiles were too big, so I ripped them off and started again with ones half the size. There's about 700 of the buggers on there, and it took a full days work to apply them all, but I'm pleased with the outcome.

This lefts me with the smaller details to sort out, like door handles and chimney pots before painting can begin. I made these out of milliput and attached them with superglue.

I decided against window ledges as I didn't like the first one I did, but in hindsight I wish I had lined the windows as the texture of the foamboard shows through and doesn't look very nice, particularly as the windows are so deep due to the cladding. Anyway, it was paint time, and it took me a couple of evenings to complete, and then an hour or so to put in some windows made from a laminated pouch with nothing in it, and laminated into a clear sheet. These don't really show as well as I would like, again due to the depth of the windows, so this is something I will have to address on the next build.

Here's the paint recipe, so hopefully I can replicate it at a later date.

Infill panels: VMC dark sand and highlighted with VMC pale sand, with a touch of army painter soft tone around the edges of the panels and highlighted again to soften the edges.
Brick work: 60/40 VMC chocolate brown / CIT evil sunz scarlet, drybrushed with CIT deathclaw brown, and a wash of VMC pale sand between the bricks.
Roof: Galeria black, followed by 70/30 VMC german grey / CIT evil sunz scarlet, and varying drybrushes of CIT brown, VMC green grey, VMC german field grey, and a final highlight of 60/40 CIT deathclaw brown.
Timber: VMC german grey, drybrush VMC beige brown, and the doors have a final drybrush of 60/40 VMC beige brown and VMC pale sand.

I learned a lot from this project, and I hope to carry those things forwards into my next build. I'm looking at scratchbuilding a shed, and modifying a sarissa timber barn in much the same manner. I also have my eye on the large Sarissa village church, and am considering scribing the stonework into DAS clay to avoid cladding the whole thing in foamboard and adding even more width and screwing up the set of the roof, but it seems like it might be a bigger job than I want. I certainly want to get the farm finished before I start anything mad, as well as about 24 feet of walls and hedgerows. I will probably pick up a few Sarissa bits when I go to Broadside next month, and my plans always end up fluid anyway, so god knows. Whilst it has provided many hours of amusement for £15, I'm still quite glad to get this farmhouse off my table and get back to painting Germans for a little while!

Hello world.

Hi everyone*, welcome to Playing Billy Suggers, a spooneristic and ocassionally foul-mouthed journey through my wargaming activities. This post is by way of a hello, and a little bit about me and my wargaming history. I shall intersperse it with pictures of what I have been working on lately; a warlord games British Army starter box, and a few other ww2 odds and ends, just to liven up the wall of text. Some of them will be a bit crap quality, like this first one, because they are snapshots from my phone. I'll try harder in future. Probably.

I have decided to ramp up my involvement in the hobby of late. For the last five years I have been languishing under the weight of a teaching job, and for the last two under the heel of a miniature tyrant (my son), and it's about bloody time I took some time and energy back to enjoy myself and get out of the house a bit. To this end, I have started to paint and build again, and I'm looking into local wargames clubs, with a view to actually going outdoors and meeting people. I've never really got the hang of doing it before, and doubt I'll be much better at this time, but I'm determined, dammit, that I shall be a quasi-hermit no longer.

I started wargaming back in about '91, having bought the Rogue Trader rulebook and a box of Space Orks. I'd been led to do so by Space Crusade, and a copy of White Dwarf bought randomly whilst on holiday on the Isle of Wight. It kept me entranced in the back of the car for the entire week and blew the mind of the ten year old who until then had been making dioramas with his airfix planes (thoroughly dunked in enamel and everything!). I played 40k religiously through until 3rd edition (and a renaissance during 5th and 6th), and WFB during the 3rd edition 'red phase'. I also played all the specialist games, and have serious soft spots for Blood Bowl, Warhammer Quest, and Necromunda to this day. I have zero interest in Age of Sigmar or the current iteration of 40k. I can't stand the scale creep, and don't think GW's current approach to miniatures lends itself to mass armies of the type I like to collect. I do still occasionally play 40k, but it is with select friends who I played with back when I was a neophyte, and only because I own an entire Ultramarine 4th company, and it would be a crime to spend that much money on something and have to keep it in a box in the loft.

I went to Salute about 8 years ago for the first time, and lo! the veil was lifted from mine eyes and I beheld the glory of the vast range of other games out there. I'm still flitting between systems, but have finally realised that you collect a period, not a rule set. To that end I am currently reviving my interest with WW2 miniatures (mainly Warlord at the moment, but I plan to branch out at some point). I also have several small dark ages warbands used mainly for SAGA but ripe for expansion if I desire, and a Crusader army, ostensibly built for a War & Conquest refight of Arsuff that I had in mind, but currently languishing as a half finished project. Most of my stuff is 28mm, because that is what I enjoy painting, but I'd very much like to try a smaller scale with either ancients or napoleonics.

That's it, really. I look forward to yelling into this void again. I'll leave you with a couple of tanks, because everyone loves tanks, right?

*Or no-one, as the case may be. I have very few expectations that this blog will get read at all, but I'm going to do it anyway. Call it my folly.