10mm Trees

My 10mm trees arrived in the mail yesterday and I've finally had a chance to have a look at them.  At first I was a little worried about what I had bought.

My first fear was that like a lot of trees that I've bought from eBay all the branches would be caught up and getting them out of the bag would be a major operation.  Thankfully the trees came out quite easily and I also noticed that there is very little loose flocking in the bag too.  The trees themselves feel quite sturdy and shouldn't mind a little bit of handling.

The plan is to mount these onto MDF like the larger trees I've done, maybe 1" discs with 1-3 trees per disc. 

Here's a few shots with some Warmaster minis and some of my 28mm trees for comparison.  Thinking about it now I should have put a 28mm mini in there for comparison too.

You can see from the above two shots that the trees are simply five or so rings of branches but the look from above, where we should be looking at 10mm trees most of the time, looks quite nice.

I'll see how far I make these go first but after looking at these I'm very tempted to place an order for another pack or two.

1/600 Scale Aircraft Props

I love my little planes, I really do but there was something about them that just didn't feel right.  At first I thought it was because they were so small or maybe even because there wasn't that many miniatures on the table.  But a week or so ago it came to me: no props.  The aircraft look incomplete without them.  So how do I make props that small?

Prototype
I found some scrap laminate I had left over from my card making projects and used a hole punch to make some small discs.  Then using a hobby knife I cut a hole in the middle, this almost ended badly for my hand so please be careful if you are going to try this yourself.

It took a lot of work but I eventually ended up with an aircraft that looks like this:

 

Yeah I know, it looks freaking sweet!  A little grey paint for some prop blur and it will look amazing.  Great so now I just need to make around a hundred or so of these...

Mass Production

My wife has one of those Craft Robo hobby cutters which should do the trick nicely.  The ideas is to use a laminate sheet which should be sturdy without being too thick for the Craft Robo to cut.

It's so obvious now but when putting a laminate pocket through your laminator with nothing in it you have to make sure it comes out the other side.  I wasn't paying enough attention when I noticed half the pocket had gone in one side but nothing was coming out the other!

 Done properly you should get something like this:

 

So I put the laminate onto the carrier sheet and loaded it into the Craft Robo, making sure to put in the right blade and the check all the settings... then I pressed the cut button. 

It looks like it's working...

And it does!

I made two sizes, one based on the the Spitfire prop size and the other based on a He 111.  I rounded the Spitfire one down to the nearest mm while I rounded the Heinkel one up.  It turns out that the bigger ones are too big while the smaller are just right.  I think the bigger ones will be fine for the really big boys like the B-17's and such so I'm not too worried.

 

I'm really happy with the results, they might need a bit of grey paint to show prop blur but even as is they look way better than they did.  I've stuck them on using MDF glue which will dry semi transparent and help with the blurred look.  All up this has taken maybe an hour from cutting the plastic to sticking them on the aircraft and it only cost me one laminate pocket which my rough calculations comes to the princely sum of 16 cents.

Here are the files for anyone who wants to have a go this themselves.  I've included a PDF version so you can cut some out on plain paper to see how the size fares with your models.
PDF version

GSD version


Storage
The only outstanding issue is now of storage.  All of my aircraft are currently stored here:

 

Most of the aircraft have enough clearance with the props on to be stored as-is but a few of them will need little risers.  I think I'll make up some little MDF risers and put some a strip of magnetic sheet on top to hold the aircraft.

Conclusion

If you have aircraft without props and have access to a cutter of some sort then you need to do this.  Your aircraft will look so much better for it.

Update:

Corrected aircraft names in the Mass Production section, thanks Doug.  Not enough sleep and I think one thing and type another.

Warmaster - Army Painter

With the long weekend and bad weather (read that as: no work in the backyard) I thought this is a good opportunity to give the Warmaster project a final shove towards being "finished". I put that in quotation marks because we all know that a project is never finished, maybe I should have put finished "for now".

Anyway I've finished everything in the top photo with these below to go.




I've also dug put my old Epic storage box to (hopefully) hold all the Warmaster and Blitzkrieg Commander stuff.




This shelf sits on some pegs so that I can store stuff on the bottom of the box, there is also another shelf like the one in the photo. I'll line each shelf so that, with the magnets, I'll be able to stack them tightly without them getting damaged by shifting about when I pick it up.

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1/1200 Scale Ships for Bag the Hun

I've been having fun with the expanded rules for ground/surface targets in Bag the Hun I decided to have a go at replacing my plain scraps of paper with some less plain scraps of paper. I haven't bought any minis yet as I'm a little torn between scales. I like the look of 1/1200 scale but they're too big (and expensive) for anything except Bag the Hun, naval games at this scale would require huge tables. 1/2400 minis are just right for the table and the wallet for naval gaming purposes but don't have that 'wow' factor of aircraft buzzing over large ships. So I think I'll start with paper 'top down' shots of some ships for the Hun and see how things go from there.

At 1/1200 they're about 6 hexes long on my map which looks right to my eyes. To reduce them to 1/2400 just print them at 50% magnification. All images are courtesy of Wikipedia.

Download a PDF version here.

Eventually I'd like to get some of these made up for the Battle of the Coral Sea scenarios I've been putting together but for now I'll toy around with these until I'm happy with the size/speed/mechanic etc.

Let me know if you find any of these useful or if you have any particular requests for ships.

10mm Bases

Some of my eBay orders arrived over the last day or two, namely the plasticard and the sheet magnets.

The plasticard looks a lot thicker than the advertised 2mm but upon measuring it is indeed only 2mm thick.  Anyway it's sturdy enough and it's black all the way through so I won't need to paint edges (hooray!)

The magnets are bang on 20mm x 40mm so they fit Warmaster bases perfectly, no trimming required.

They add very little to the depth of the bases and the strength is quite good considering that sheet magnets aren't known for their strength, although the Carrion probably isn't the best test as it's a pretty light model.  Then again I don't need the magnets to stick the minis to my fridge, I just want then to stay still on movement trays and in storage.  Quite pleased with these overall, I may just have to order another pack or two and do all my Warmaster stuff too.

I'm a little tempted to start cutting the plasticard into Warmaster sized bases now so that I'm ready to start as soon as the Pendraken stuff arrives.  Maybe I will for the infantry bases but I should wait and see how the tanks fit first.