Monday 10 May 2010

Olustee - Perry USCT part one

Posts to this blog, like London buses: you wait a year for one and then two come along at once. Anyhow, although Gettysburg day one is the long term project, I've had a long term interest in the Battle of Olustee or Ocean Pond.

Fortuntely it has one of the best civil war websites dedicated to it http://battleofolustee.org/
which has a huge amount of research on every facet of the conflict. One of the features of the battle is the deployment of US Coloured Troops in the Union orbat.

At Salute this year, with this battle in mind; I picked up a couple of packs of metal heads (both Black and Confederate sets) to go with the plastics I bought... two years ago... My excuse is that the plastic sets didn't offer enough variety ;)

There are 36 heads per pack (12 different heads x3 arranged on 6 sprues) one sprue seems not to be as crisply cast as the others, but fortunately I only needed 5 sprues for the regiment I'm building.

The first stage was to remove all the existing heads; I found a twist with pliers to be the best method - although these are 'hard' plastic, a scalpel still makes short work of them. Luckily the musket I chopped in two was recoverable!

Next stage involved drilling a hole in the neck to accept the 'plug' attached to the heads(saves pinning each head individually). The first one was done with a pin vice, but I got bored and used a dremmel on the rest (point to note: the drill bit will melt plastic at high rpm).

Having successfully attached the heads (I found cutting down the collar of the sack coat allowed the head to sit correctly; using a thick superglue meant I didn't need to go over the collars with putty which was a bonus), I then looked at the command figures. I wasn't going to use the plastic standard bearer as he is wearing a shell jacket so I had to get the metal command set - oddly slightly taller and more willowy than the plastic troops they command. I debated whether to use them 'as is' but decided to do head swaps for the drummer and NCO. The standard bearers retained their original heads as removing the large beard would have damaged the miniature and in any case, the flags will cover their faces.

The last image shows a selection of the completed regiment. The head swaps are an ideal way to add variety to the massed plastic ranks. Hardee hats next please! (although I imagine the Iron Brigade may be released in metal in due course).

Foundry EIR Auxilia


Ooh. Can't believe how long since the last post on this thing; I did say it was irregular... Anyway, I found these photos hiding on the hard drive: Foundry Imperial Roman Auxilia. Again these were knocked out on a production line, so true wargamer's standard for these!

The optio's spear has been replaced with wire; the original looked like a tree trunk, but apart from that they are unconverted. The shield is an overpainted decal.