When your PC goes phut!

 You have to admit that computers are great until they aren't, as I found out this last weekend.  On Saturday evening everything was working fine.  On Sunday morning the beast wouldn't boot up.  It went straight to Windows diagnostic then to automatic repair then to a high tech version of 'Computer says no'!  Turns out that my desktop couldn't read the tiny hard drive which contains the boot up instructions.  ASUS in their wisdom send the machine I have out with such a tiny boot drive that it can't hold a restore point to solve this issue.  Fortunately there is a very good computer tech in the town who doesn't charge an arm or a leg for that matter to fix things.  He had to take the box away save all my data and reinstall Windows 11.

So I now have a functioning computer again but have to reinstall all my apps including MS office which will take a while and preclude a lot of the stuff I have been doing of late until everything is reinstalled.  So there may be a delay in updates on the home made 2mm armies.

Matchstick men and matchstick .....

......... horses and riders. Come on you didn't really think I was going to say cats and dogs did you? Although L S Lowry really did paint the street I grew up on a couple of years after I was born. It's not one of his greatest works and he took a bit of artistic licence with the look of the thing. However, I digress, you want to hear about my matchstick obsession not art criticism.

What I'm attempting to do is create something that doesn't look too naff next to the rather nice Irregular Miniatures 2mm cavalry.  My go to is the armoured pistolier casting of  15 troopers in three ranks from their renaissance range.   So far (after a couple of tries) I have the basic footprint pretty much as I want it compared to the casting.  The issue is getting the individual horses'  head and neck looking right as they are big enough to notice but small enough to be tricky to model in 2mm. 

You can clearly see horse heads and necks on these armoured pistoliers

You can see that its going to be a big ask to create something to compete with these little beauties.  It's hard to accept that each horse and rider has a footprint which is slightly smaller than a grain of rice!

Here you can see the wedge shapes depicting heads and necks

My mark one paper and matchstick effort really isn't cutting the mustard.  The horses need to go on a diet as their bodies are too wide and I still haven't added any riders or horse's heads plus over all these are too big.  

My non mustard cutting first stage.

So the next attempt saw the horse prints reduced in size (and starved of hay for a while) so they were closer in size to the Irregular Miniatures castings.  I also added a layer of card on top of the matchsticks to raise the overall height.  That looked a lot more like the idea I had in mind but still not much like the castings do.  I would have to make up rows of riders to glue along the rows of horses and then some teeny tiny heads.  Which sounds like a lot of time and effort to make something that isn't anything like as good as a cast block of horses.  So I'm going to call this a failure and look to see what is available to purchase.

In other news the infantry blocks are easy to make and don't look bad at all so I will be continuing with those.

First two Swedish brigades now with flags.

The Yellow Brigade has the lower pikes from the original test run while the Blue brigade has two layers of matchsticks forming the pikes.  That changes where I can place the (over sized) flags.  If I placed them on top of the Blue Brigade pike I think it would be too tall, hence the frontal placement, but I prefer the look of them sprouting from within the block.

Close up of one of the Yellow Brigade pike blocks

I think I need to add some stripes of light and dark to the pike to show some indication of individual pike shafts.   I'm wondering if I could do a printed skin for that as I have for the troops. 

Comparison of the two options for pike blocks

So what does the audience think one row in height or two rows?  Flags front or on top? Do the pike need something extra to suggest pike shafts and if so how should I attempt that?  

Matchstick Madness part 3

Having become reasonably adept at creating bodies of infantry I thought it was time to try my hand with cavalry.  When I was building the Altar of Freedom armies I chickened out at this stage and just bought some of Irregular miniature's 2mm figures as I only needed a handful of units.  Seventeenth century armies are a different kettle of fish (or possibly stable of horses) as the armies were often 50% cavalry.  That meant that I felt it was worth spending a little time considering options for scratch building some donkey wallopers.  My first port of call was the web but everything I found focussed on infantry and like me when it came to the mounted arm the posters had all bought castings to do the job.  The 2mm and small scale group on face book had a couple of examples but they looked to be rather time consuming to make.  So it was back to the drawing board I had to go.

Here is the size relationship between infantryman and cavalryman 

The first thing to do was to establish the relative height of a horse compared to a standing man.  While I have stood next to re-enactment cavalry more times than I care to remember I have always been 'otherwise engaged' at those moments and not taking detailed notes (as shown above, yes dear reader that's me in the red coat)!  My feeling is that a cavalry horse is about the same height as an infantryman measuring to the horse's shoulder.  My quick google search confirmed this as a reasonable rule of thumb.  The head is about half as high again measuring to the ears.  So the illustration below shows a possible configuration from the side.  The square being a single matchstick in end section to show the height of an infantry formation in a couple of ranks.  The horse being two match sticks and a card upright for the rider.  The sizes look about right to my eye although it doesn't look much like a horse.

A basic comparison of side views

If I trial a bit of conversion by paintbrush to see how it might look then it starts to improve a little bit and appears slightly more convincing.  

But still not going to win prizes at Horse of the Year

The issue is how to get the head to sit where it needs to be and how to model the neck.  The head should be dropped about 40 or 45 degrees and there should be a slope upwards from the shoulder to the base of the 'skull'.  However, that's not the biggest problem.  The biggest problem with the look of these is the top view of a rank of horses .as unlike infantry where a single length of match sticks can fool the eye horses are in a more open order with each horse being a separate lump of whatever I eventually model it from.  The next issue is how to model the rider as a single rider is only going to have a thin cross section compared to blocks of infantry.  Below are the prototype horse bodies (in three and six rank formations) as seen from above, front and rear.  When scaled down to the correct size they don't look too bad but I need to add heads and riders still.

Still not going to be at Olympia (assuming horse of the year is still held there)

I'm beginning to remember why I caved in and went back to Irregular for my 2mm cavalry!