One of the things I have started to do as part of my re-enactment hobby is make the slow match for the musket block I'm a member of (see it wasn't a post about cricket at all). It's a vital item for a matchlock musketeer who will go through at least a meter of the stuff at every reenactment weekend. Of course you can buy it, but its easy and quick to make your own, it saves money and you can't always get the stuff when you need it.
Back in the seventeenth century soldiers on campaign would steal, er I mean requisition, the cords that criss crossed bed frames to hold up the mattress to make match cord with, so after they passed through town you would be sleeping on the floor until you could get more rope. Saltpetre was a little more difficult to source with original recipes using dissolved black powder, or ash and lye or even boiling down urine to obtain it. In fact human urine was such a good source it was collected on an industrial scale from alehouses, private homes and even by stealing the contents of cesspits! Poorer people would sell their urine as a source of income, provided they weren't so poor that they didn't have a pot to piss in!
For me it's a easier and a lot less smelly! The commonest source for the cord is 100% jute sash window cord in either 6mm or 8mm diameter. Easily obtained online (pun not intended). I tend to buy from a firm called P T Winchester Ltd as I can be sure it doesn't have a nylon core. Saltpetre is Potassium Nitrate (KnO3) and is sold as lawn food, stump remover or (in food grade quality) for curing bacon or hams. Again the internet is your friend here. I look for something that is as pure as possible assay at 99% pure if I can get it, which I usually can.
Making the slow match is simple. Add 4 or 5 litres of cold water to a bucket and stir in 4 - 6 Tablespoons of saltpetre per litre. Throw in the sash cord (if it was in a hank unroll it first) and weigh it down to ensure it is submerged. Leave it for 12 - 24 hours. Lastly take it out and lay it out flat to dry. This last part is important, as it ensure that the saltpetre is evenly distributed. Once it is dry you have your slow match. Don't throw away the unused solution. It doesn't go off and can be topped up to replace the bit soaked up by the cord and used again. With sash cord at about £50 per 100 metres and saltpetre at about £12 a kilo I reckon that even without recycling the saltpetre solution it is costing less than 60p a metre (not counting the cost of the bucket!) for the finished matchcord.
The exact amount of saltpetre to use can be found by trial and error, sometimes you get slower match than other batches, sometimes faster. I prefer to err on the side of faster as at least I know it will burn. What you are aiming for is a burn rate of about 1-2 cm a minute without it spitting. Spitting is a sign of too much saltpetre so if that occurs with the lit cord all you do when you top up the solution for the next batch is add more water and less saltpetre to the replacement solution.
Thursday, 26 September 2019
Monday, 2 September 2019
The dead lay all around
I have been considering how to create some markers to show units who have taken 'hits' in ADLG. Under those rules units degrade in combat rather than being pushed back or destroyed as is the case in DBA and it's offshoots like DBMM. The downside of the extra granularity is the need to record the effect of combat. Despite having used micro dice in my own rules for 2mm ECW I prefer a table with markers that appear to be battlefield debris or casualties where possible.
With that thought in mind I thought I would have a look at making some markers using Baccus casualty figures. They do these as specific dark age castings and although they come with a mix of kite and round shields at 6mm scale it doesn't really show up. There is a mix of cavalry and foot all prone and hors d'combat. I should be able to fit them onto UK 1p coins as a base with a bit of trimming. The castings come as strips but the base between the figures is thin and easily cut back with side cutters. I struggled a bit with the cavalry casualties as it was hard to see how the rider was laid across the horse but reading specs and the magnifier lamp helped.
I have done without the buckets of blood and gore effect for these I don't think it adds anything. Plus I find it hard to make it look anything other than a bit cartoonish.
I'm considering going for one standing casualty as one hit, one prone casualty as two hits and two prone as three hits as that lets me keep to 1p basing. I just need to source some standing 6mm casualties or kit bash some from the bits box. But that may change if I can find a way to squeeze three figures onto each coin as I could then go for a simple count the bodies system!
With that thought in mind I thought I would have a look at making some markers using Baccus casualty figures. They do these as specific dark age castings and although they come with a mix of kite and round shields at 6mm scale it doesn't really show up. There is a mix of cavalry and foot all prone and hors d'combat. I should be able to fit them onto UK 1p coins as a base with a bit of trimming. The castings come as strips but the base between the figures is thin and easily cut back with side cutters. I struggled a bit with the cavalry casualties as it was hard to see how the rider was laid across the horse but reading specs and the magnifier lamp helped.
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| Casualties clustered around a 1p coin for scale (1cm grid) |
I'm considering going for one standing casualty as one hit, one prone casualty as two hits and two prone as three hits as that lets me keep to 1p basing. I just need to source some standing 6mm casualties or kit bash some from the bits box. But that may change if I can find a way to squeeze three figures onto each coin as I could then go for a simple count the bodies system!
Friday, 30 August 2019
Some like it hot
They tell me that some people like really hot weather. They must be the ones who don't spend bank holidays running up and down fields in woolen clothes and armour and carrying an assortment of out of date military equipment. For those of us who indulge in military reenactment as a hobby bank holidays are usually wet. Either from the outside in or the inside out, there doesn't seem to be any happy medium. This last one was no exception it was a getting wet from the inside out variant which is getting more common of late. The display on our car claimed it was 29 centigrade, in the shade maybe. Where I was it was difficult to find shade, not even in the lee of the average re-enactor ( who is probably best described as large economy sized)*.
Still it did help build up a thirst which our Bavarian guests were keen to help us deal with. Forty plus Bavarian Pikemen from the Memmingen Pikeniere. Who says the EU doesn't do anything useful for British culture. I didn't go on the field the second day. I'd like to claim it was due to drinking prodigious quantities of Bavarian beer. I'd like too but I can't because I was asleep by 8.00pm the heat had done for me.
Some may like it hot, but not apparently I don't.
* which reminds me that the BBC apparently turned down an offer from the Sealed Knot to provide extras for a Civil War drama with the killer put down of "Too old, Too fat". Harsh, but sadly really rather fair.
Still it did help build up a thirst which our Bavarian guests were keen to help us deal with. Forty plus Bavarian Pikemen from the Memmingen Pikeniere. Who says the EU doesn't do anything useful for British culture. I didn't go on the field the second day. I'd like to claim it was due to drinking prodigious quantities of Bavarian beer. I'd like too but I can't because I was asleep by 8.00pm the heat had done for me.
Some may like it hot, but not apparently I don't.
* which reminds me that the BBC apparently turned down an offer from the Sealed Knot to provide extras for a Civil War drama with the killer put down of "Too old, Too fat". Harsh, but sadly really rather fair.
Thursday, 22 August 2019
Fields of Fire
Well it's actually flock in this case not fire. A chance conversation with Phil Steele from the Northamptonshire Battlefields Society brought me back to a project which has been on hold for a while. That project being the making of some Ridge and Furrow fields for the Medieval to 17th Century period. Phil needs some for the 1469 Edgecote Battlefield model the Society is currently displaying at events. I had what I thought might be just the thing, courtesy of Hobbycraft. Its a brown corrugated rubber/plastic sheet, A4 size. The ridges are about 3 to the centimetre and stand a couple of millimeters high so ready made ridge and furrow for smaller scales.
All that is really needed is to cut the sheet to the required size and then glue some flock to the top of the ridges. Of course as with a lot of my projects I needed to go back an additional step and make my own static grass applicator before I could do the flock application! It was a really easy job using an electric fly swatter and a small seive as the main components. The trickiest part is the soldering of the wires coming out of the circuit board of the fly swatter to the sieve on one side and a length of additional wire on the other. Mind you if I can do it anyone can so not exactly rocket science. I'm not going to provide any detailed instructions as there are any number of good tutorials only a Google search away.
I was a bit concerned about getting the flock to stick to the corrugated sheet. I needn't have worried it stuck fine. Simply place a thin strip of PVA on the top of the raised ridges and sprinkle the flock and Bob's your mother's brother! Well not quite, the thin school style PVA does tend to flow down into the grooves rather than stay where it was meant to be, but the strands do stand on end! Still its part of a learning curve and a second test with woodworking PVA was more successful. I will take some photos of the finished article when its, well, finished!
Its off to the wars for me this weekend. The Sealed Knot has its largest event of the year just outside Scarborough this coming bank holiday weekend so I will be shooting at the ever romantic but commonly wrong supporters of that man of blood Charles Stuart for a couple of days.
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| Sorry about the sideways image. This is the Hobbycraft sheet. |
All that is really needed is to cut the sheet to the required size and then glue some flock to the top of the ridges. Of course as with a lot of my projects I needed to go back an additional step and make my own static grass applicator before I could do the flock application! It was a really easy job using an electric fly swatter and a small seive as the main components. The trickiest part is the soldering of the wires coming out of the circuit board of the fly swatter to the sieve on one side and a length of additional wire on the other. Mind you if I can do it anyone can so not exactly rocket science. I'm not going to provide any detailed instructions as there are any number of good tutorials only a Google search away.
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| The completed applicator. Its a bit Heath Robinson but it does the job. |
Its off to the wars for me this weekend. The Sealed Knot has its largest event of the year just outside Scarborough this coming bank holiday weekend so I will be shooting at the ever romantic but commonly wrong supporters of that man of blood Charles Stuart for a couple of days.
Tuesday, 6 August 2019
Ambush Markers
ADLG uses some hidden deployment rules which need markers for the rough location of the unit in ambush, or blinds where they could be (but aren’t). As I had some H&R figures that were not being used for anything I thought I could use them on the markers. I wanted something a little better than a simple square with a ID number on it so I started to think about what might stop the other side being certain of what was in the potential ambush location.
What I came up with was the element of doubt, the 'are those troops or just bushes in the shadows/mist/gloom' factor. To recreate that I decided that a simple paint job of Vallejo sky gray, with a black ink wash was enough for the troops it gives some detailing but overall keeps the idea of not quite being able to see what it is you are looking at idea going. I based then with my usual fine sand textured base but painted some random gray patches rather than adding flock.and then added something to represent mist.
As luck would have it (not saying what kind of luck) George our Brittany had decided to disembowel a dog bed and I had tufts of stuffing material all over the place. Clearly no one was going to miss a bit of that when it came to restuffing the bed so I grabbed some and added it to my bits box.
With a bit of teasing out it became thin enough to look vaguely like mist and a drop of glue was enough to hold it in place. I wrote a code letter on the underside of the base and done. I'm not claiming them as great works of art but they are good enough for a game marker.
What I came up with was the element of doubt, the 'are those troops or just bushes in the shadows/mist/gloom' factor. To recreate that I decided that a simple paint job of Vallejo sky gray, with a black ink wash was enough for the troops it gives some detailing but overall keeps the idea of not quite being able to see what it is you are looking at idea going. I based then with my usual fine sand textured base but painted some random gray patches rather than adding flock.and then added something to represent mist.
As luck would have it (not saying what kind of luck) George our Brittany had decided to disembowel a dog bed and I had tufts of stuffing material all over the place. Clearly no one was going to miss a bit of that when it came to restuffing the bed so I grabbed some and added it to my bits box.
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| George, my able assistant and destroyer of dog beds |
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| What's that coming over the hill, is it a dog bed, is it a dog bed? |
Monday, 5 August 2019
The lights are going out
Those who have read my earlier ramblings will know how much I use a magnifier lamp to assist in painting as I do tend to concentrate on 6mm stuff!. Well a few days ago I noticed the light was flickering and next day it had failed completely. Now I have had this lamp for the best part of ten years and my first thought was on the lines of 'oh bugger I'm going to have to buy a new one!'. However in a fit of eco friendliness I checked the make and model and tried to get a replacement for the failed circular fluorescent tube.
Another 'oh bugger' moment now occurred as the website listed on the label no longer existed. But wait there was a limited company named as the maker on that same label so perhaps my google fu would find that. A couple of minutes later and I found myself looking at the web pages of the manufacturer - Shesto Ltd. Not, as the name might lead you to suppose, a Chinese business but a long established British brand. A quick search of their product lines resulted in yet another 'oh bugger' moment as they no longer make the model of magnifier lamp I own. Still there were replacement light tubes with similar model numbers so nothing ventured, nothing gained and I rang the sales line. To be fair I was expecting that there would be no direct replacement, or a minimum order, or trade only sales, but what I actually received was some of the best customer service you could ever hope to get.
The lady on the sales line went off and checked the model number and the bulb details from my burnt out tube and compared the spec to the current items they stocked and confirmed that although the part number was different the one they now stocked should fit and...get this...'if it doesn't work send it back and we will refund you' ! All for an order of one bulb costing under £15 including postage. I tried to order from the website but got an error so called them back, and was again met with the same excellent customer service. So order made I settled down to await the delivery.
The replacement lamp* arrived within 48 hours and was the one I needed. It went into place easily, only seven screws to deal with and that included the cable retainer gadget. The whole process took under 15 minutes from start to finish. Its really nice to have a bit of kit which is designed to allow a home handy man to replace pretty much all the electrical parts.
I can heartily recommend Shesto Ltd, they stock a range of lamps and tools for hobbyists, the price isn't exorbitant and the quality of the products is great. All in all worth checking out. Now that I can see what I'm doing again it's back to painting!
* For those who like the technical details it's a 12w 6400K bulb, 6400K is the kelvin colour temperature and for what it is worth is on the top end of daylight bulbs. If you need to know more about the temperature colour I found this useful explanation on line https://www.energystore-usa.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=23.
Another 'oh bugger' moment now occurred as the website listed on the label no longer existed. But wait there was a limited company named as the maker on that same label so perhaps my google fu would find that. A couple of minutes later and I found myself looking at the web pages of the manufacturer - Shesto Ltd. Not, as the name might lead you to suppose, a Chinese business but a long established British brand. A quick search of their product lines resulted in yet another 'oh bugger' moment as they no longer make the model of magnifier lamp I own. Still there were replacement light tubes with similar model numbers so nothing ventured, nothing gained and I rang the sales line. To be fair I was expecting that there would be no direct replacement, or a minimum order, or trade only sales, but what I actually received was some of the best customer service you could ever hope to get.
The lady on the sales line went off and checked the model number and the bulb details from my burnt out tube and compared the spec to the current items they stocked and confirmed that although the part number was different the one they now stocked should fit and...get this...'if it doesn't work send it back and we will refund you' ! All for an order of one bulb costing under £15 including postage. I tried to order from the website but got an error so called them back, and was again met with the same excellent customer service. So order made I settled down to await the delivery.
The replacement lamp* arrived within 48 hours and was the one I needed. It went into place easily, only seven screws to deal with and that included the cable retainer gadget. The whole process took under 15 minutes from start to finish. Its really nice to have a bit of kit which is designed to allow a home handy man to replace pretty much all the electrical parts.
I can heartily recommend Shesto Ltd, they stock a range of lamps and tools for hobbyists, the price isn't exorbitant and the quality of the products is great. All in all worth checking out. Now that I can see what I'm doing again it's back to painting!
* For those who like the technical details it's a 12w 6400K bulb, 6400K is the kelvin colour temperature and for what it is worth is on the top end of daylight bulbs. If you need to know more about the temperature colour I found this useful explanation on line https://www.energystore-usa.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=23.
Friday, 2 August 2019
Excuses time!
I've been a bit lax with blog posts of late. In my defence real life has intervened in the shape of work and home improvements. On the plus side I have had the chance to play some games with Trebian's 'Monday Night Gamers' who confusingly get together on Tuesdays (see some of my earlier posts). I have also found time and space to set up my painting table.
I have been painting some of the 6mm figures from Baccus which I have had since last year. These are mainly figures for Viking age games for the period 795 - 1066 AD. I'm not just working on the obvious Anglo-Saxon and Viking forces but also on the nations around the fringes. These consist of the british remnant states of Dumnonia (in the South West of England covering modern Cornwall and parts of Devon in the 790's), the Welsh princedoms and Strathclyde. Along with these are the two other Scottish factions of the Picts and Dal Raitian Scots, who may or may not have been one kingdom in all but name by this stage.
The range from Baccus covers almost everything I need except for Picts and Scots. I can proxy Gothic horse and foot for generic Early Medieval types Which covers off the limited cavalry options, only the Strathclyde Welsh seem to have had any significant heavy cavalry in this period. The welsh have some lighter horse which I can cover using the Gothic Medium Cavalry figures from Baccus. Their Gothic Infantry also work well as Strathclyde Welsh Pedyts (Spearmen) and Anglo Saxon General Fyrd. Moorish Foot from the Roman range provide some nicely animated figures for the various LMI javelinmen and welsh medium Infantry types. The Picts are provided by Irregular miniatures as are Scots - Irish swordsmen. I'm only really left scratching around for proxy figures for the Pictish light infantry and Scots-Irish Kerns.
I'm very happy with the quality of the baccus figures and would really like to use then for everything. If only Peter would do a Pictish range! Irregular Miniatures are a mixed bunch some castings are as good as anyone might wish others could do with a re-sculpt. I bought a couple of their pack mule figures which are lovely little figures with crisp clear details, although noticeably smaller than Baccus, I'm going to claim they are boys with pack ponies rather than mules!
On the terrain front I do a lot of scratch building for fields and woodland (watch this space for details of how I make these). Buildings are from Leven Miniatures and Timecast and are sat in the paining queue. So I have been busy just not with blogging.
I have been painting some of the 6mm figures from Baccus which I have had since last year. These are mainly figures for Viking age games for the period 795 - 1066 AD. I'm not just working on the obvious Anglo-Saxon and Viking forces but also on the nations around the fringes. These consist of the british remnant states of Dumnonia (in the South West of England covering modern Cornwall and parts of Devon in the 790's), the Welsh princedoms and Strathclyde. Along with these are the two other Scottish factions of the Picts and Dal Raitian Scots, who may or may not have been one kingdom in all but name by this stage.
The range from Baccus covers almost everything I need except for Picts and Scots. I can proxy Gothic horse and foot for generic Early Medieval types Which covers off the limited cavalry options, only the Strathclyde Welsh seem to have had any significant heavy cavalry in this period. The welsh have some lighter horse which I can cover using the Gothic Medium Cavalry figures from Baccus. Their Gothic Infantry also work well as Strathclyde Welsh Pedyts (Spearmen) and Anglo Saxon General Fyrd. Moorish Foot from the Roman range provide some nicely animated figures for the various LMI javelinmen and welsh medium Infantry types. The Picts are provided by Irregular miniatures as are Scots - Irish swordsmen. I'm only really left scratching around for proxy figures for the Pictish light infantry and Scots-Irish Kerns.
I'm very happy with the quality of the baccus figures and would really like to use then for everything. If only Peter would do a Pictish range! Irregular Miniatures are a mixed bunch some castings are as good as anyone might wish others could do with a re-sculpt. I bought a couple of their pack mule figures which are lovely little figures with crisp clear details, although noticeably smaller than Baccus, I'm going to claim they are boys with pack ponies rather than mules!
On the terrain front I do a lot of scratch building for fields and woodland (watch this space for details of how I make these). Buildings are from Leven Miniatures and Timecast and are sat in the paining queue. So I have been busy just not with blogging.
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| Baccus Gothic Medium Horse as Welsh Cavalry |
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