The Saga of the Minotaur

I'm still clearing off the table of 15mm fantasy to get moving on my 3 & 6mm figures. Don't worry, I will be back working on them soon! I've got a SA-2 missile site I'm working on in 3mm. The missiles and their radar systems are done, but I am working on the site itself. On to my story:

I got this very nice minotaur from Splintered Light Miniatures called Giant Minotaur Warrior.

http://www.splinteredlightminis.com/gimiwa.html

He has a lot of really nice detail on him and I thought he'd add one more extra punch to my bad-guy barbarian army.

I was really proud of my initial paint job, until this happened:

The wash I used turned it into a uniformly brown, goopy mess! It obscured most of the highlights that I added especially on the hair & fur. The culprit:

I am not really sure why it turned out so bad. I've been mixing my own washes since the late 90s. My standard mix is Future liquid acrylic floor wax (or whatever its called now), with ink/another wash/paint/etc. I don't have a standard ratio as each pigment medium has different properties. I mix the two together, run the mixture across the ridges of a bottle cap with a brush, and if I like what I see, I use it; if not, I adjust either floor wax or the pigment. Inks have very fine pigments but are very intense. I thought I had made the right ratio. In addition to being too intense, the floor wax started solidifying very quickly. Again, I've worked with this stuff forever and I know how long I have to work with it before it solidifies.

So, I ended up stripping the whole thing with a combination of oven cleaner and Simple Green. I repainted it, but I feel it is just not as good as my original:

Left: Battle Valor Games, Center: Splintered Light, Right: Ral Partha Europe (Demonworld)

I did use a wash, but very sparingly. It was a mixture of the floor wax and black acrylic paint. No problems this time. I haven't condemned the Vallejo ink to the back of the drawer. I might try it again to see if I get better results on a different figure. Also, I use a Windsor & Newton sepia ink on my 3mm armies, so I might try the Vallejo and see what I get on those.

Pinewood Derby Car

The completed car:

Update on Life

Last week, I got that bile duct stone removed. My recovery was a little slower than I expected but I did get to work on some stuff including the SA-2 missile battery that I posted previously. But so far, so good.

Besides the missiles, my main project has been to help my son finish his pinewood derby car for this Saturday's race. Like most projects, I get bogged down on my ambitions. Adding to this has been my recovery from the surgery. By about 3:00 in the afternoon, I have been hitting a wall have little energy to do anything. Originally, I had plans to be mostly finished with the car last weekend, but Friday and Saturday was pretty much a bust. I think I was in bed by 7:00 last Friday. But if all goes well, we should be done tonight. Here is a work in progress picture.

The boy painted it. As you can see, it wasn't the neatest job, so I touched it up. When its done, there will be a driver in the form of a LEGO Star Wars minifigure. The holes behind the cockpit is to put lead weights in. 

Primerpalooza

Many a mini were primed last night

After feeling victorious in the battle to glue the SA-2 missiles to their bases, I primed them and a whole bunch of 15 mm figures using Vallejo's brush on primer. It seems to work just as well as Mr. Surfacer's primer and I don't have to deal with nasty fumes from the lacquer thinner. Up to this point, I've been just spraying the 1/600 figures directly with camo paint to save some time. But its been raining every single day for the past week or so, and spray paint and high humidity do not mix. I have figured out a few colors that are a very close approximation to the Kylon camouflage spray that I use for the Bovatopians, so I will just brush paint them instead of waiting until who-knows-when to spray paint them.

1/600 SA-2 Missiles in Progress

I am setting up the air war aspect of the invasion of Bovatopia by Lavonia, which will kick off the campaign. I have all the aircraft painted but there are a few more additions. I just got this Russian SA-2 Guideline SAM battery from Pico Armor. It includes the Fan Song and Spoon Rest radars in addition to 6 missiles with their launchers. I had a few minutes and started working on them last night. I thought it would be a quick build and I'd be showing you the painted results. Nope. 

I wasn't sure what the problem was but I could not get the missiles to glue to their launchers. I used three types of CA glue. I don't know if it was a humidity problem (its been raining in eastern Tennessee for over a week now), old glue, or the nature of the miniatures. There was almost zero surface area to glue the missiles to their launchers, plus O8 uses this very hard metal to cast its figures. I finally got three of them to stick. Here are the results:

Left side: Fan Song radar, middle: SA-2s, right side: truck for Spoon Rest radar

The Spoon Rest radar antenna is provided as a piece of clear plastic with the antenna itself printed on. I have no clue what the function of the two different radar systems are, but it seems like the Spoon Rest is closely associated with the SA-2 missiles. Maybe it tracks the missiles to their targets, whereas the Spoon Rest detects the targets. 

Dragon Knight

I painted this guy up during an effort to reduce my pile of 15 mm fantasy lead. He's a Demonworld miniature now sold at Ral Partha Europe. I think he's supposed to be a bad guy, but I'm not sure. I experimented with making his armor metallic green by mixing green ink with silver paint, but it looks more blue. My shield painting skills are not what they used to be, it isn't awful.

My son wanted me to post this character here. Fully armed Spider-Spawn. You would think a superhero wouldn't need all the fire power, but I guess better safe than sorry.

Experimenting with Flight Stands

I've been playing around with some different ways to mount 1/600 aircraft on to stands, and the stands themselves.

I as much as I like rare earth magnets to mount jets, there are some drawbacks to them. First issue I have was when I had a magnet on a model as well as on the stand. I tried really hard to make sure the polarities matched, but I didn't always get that right. Second, it was very hard for me to make sure the magnet was mounted on the model so that it was level. Third, rare earth magnets do not like to stay glued.  I suppose that drilling a hole into the model and inserting the magnet into it might have taken care of at least the second and third issue, however, I don't know if my hole would have been any more level than just gluing the magnet on. So, to solve this for at least some aircraft, I glued a tiny piece of steel the bottom.

Using tin snips, I cut out a tiny piece of metal off of some can top. I pounded it out with a hammer to make sure it was as flat as possible, then I glued it to the model. I did have to slightly file down the spot were I glued on the metal piece, but this model of a Mirage 2000 was pretty flat to begin with. Here is what it looks like on a stand.

The advantages are that I don't have to worry about magnet-to-magnet polarity issues, it is a lot easier to make sure the metal piece is level, and it sticks well to the model. The big drawback is that I cannot use this technique with some models. Many of my helicopters and some jets need the metal to project out beyond the bottom of the model. For example, I have some attack helicopters with weapons slung on either side of the bottom. If I didn't have the small cylinder rare earth magnet projecting out, there would not be a contact with the top of the stand.

The second experiment was the stand itself. If you read two of my posts where I play test some rules, you might have noticed some differences in stands. One stand is my LEGO stands. I like them a lot, but it is somewhat difficult to change altitudes. The second stand was a jury-rigged steel base with 1" cylinder rare earth magnets. These are potentially easier to swap out to show changes in altitude, but they have the annoying effect of being so strong that they will pull other bases to each other if close enough. So here is my an experimental base I've come up with:

The stand is a piece of styrene plastic. On it, I glued a piece of metal. The metal cylinder is not a rare earth magnet, but a 5 mm diameter peg used for shelving brackets. The ends are not perfectly level by any means, but its not horrible. The peg is connected to the base by a small magnet. In turn the jet has a magnet glued to it. The hope is that the magnetic field of the two tiny magnets are not strong enough to drag another stand to it, and the plastic base will provide enough of a buffer zone, so to speak.

If all goes well this week, I plan to have another air combat test game using these stands.