Building Roof Access

Many years ago I bought a Sarissa City Block Building. It is very nice, and easy to build. It has a nice flat roof so you can deploy your figures on it. What it does lack is any way of getting on the roof.

Time passed again...

There was a question on the Lead Adventures forum  about roof access, and this prompted me to put a cheap and simple roof hatch together.

First, find one 25mm square blank base and one 20mm base (it can be blank or a slotted one).

This particular 20mm base has a small feed pip at the centre, which needs to be filed flat.

The 25mm base had writing and ejection marks on the underside. These were also filed flat. Check that the 20mm base fits snugly and flat inside.

Once that was completed, the underside of the 25mm base was liberally coated with liquid poly, and the 20mm base placed inside.

If you have them to hand, you can use a staple as a handle, or as I did, bend one out of 0.7mm brass rod. Drill a suitable hole (or holes) and glue it in place. I added a plate of thin Evergreen strip as a base plate for the handle.

This is a turn and lift handle.

You can then place (or glue) the roof hatch on your building.

Little Leaf Company scale leaves

Many years ago I bought some leaf scatter made by the Little Leaf Company from Green Scenes at a model railway show. I had not had an opportunity to use until this week.

Here is the result.

We Demand More... Shrubbery!

After pondering the decision on leaves or no leaves, and putting the question out to the Lead Adventures Forum, I decided that it was going to be leaves.

The first task was to reduce the fluffiness of the poly fibre.

Here is the before.

I reduced the amount of fibre, it looked like by a half by the amount I put back in the box.

One of the things I did notice was that against my normal grey background the fibre foliage was rather opaque, however if I looked at it silhouetted against the window it was a lot less dense, so here is the same tree against a white background.

Many years ago I bought a packet of "Mid Green" leaves by the The Little Leaf Company. from Green Scene at a local model railway show,

The packet contains very small flat pieces of material in a nice mid green colour.

I applied PVA with a large paintbrush to the poly fibre to areas then added the leaves to the poly fibre.

Here is the tree against a white background.

I need to spray the tree with a fixative to try and keep the leaves in place.

Albedo Combat Patrol - Skirmish Starter Set - part three

Comparison shots.
EDF Heavy Infantry and ILF Light Infantry.

Compared with my standard 28mm figure, William Killian

Compared with Harrison Wells, Team Flash by Knight Models (unfinished).

Malifaux Freikorp.

 Brian (soon to be The Governor) escapes The Walking Dead.

Lead Legion Space Marine.

Albedo Combat Patrol - Skirmish Starter Set - part two

EDF Heavy Infantry.

This is a feline member of the EDF armed with an assault rifle.

I missed a mould line on the right arm.

The fur is Citadel XV-88. The contrast with the Vallejo English Uniform is not really sufficient. It is dry brushed with Citadel Terminatus Stone and washed with Citadel Seraphim Sepia. The eyes are Citadel Jokaero Orange. Again the difference in colour is rather washed out in the standard photographs.

The battle dress is Vallejo English Uniform, dry brushed with Citadel Terminatus Stone and washed with Citadel Agrax Earthshade.

The armour and rifle fore grip is Vallejo Russian Uniform Green, dry brushed with Citadel Terminatus Stone and washed with Citadel Athonian Camoshade.

I tried photographing the same figure against a white background, the eyes really glow.

Albedo Combat Patrol - Skirmish Starter Set - part one

I remembered seeing the Albedo Anthropomorphics comics at Forbidden Planet (the one on Denmark Street), but had not paid it much attention.

The stories involved stories that could have been told with human characters, but instead with anthropomorphic animals, This was the birth of the independent comics period, and the production was not sophisticated, but they had stories to tell.

If you want to read the source material, it is available here.

Time passed.

I had been following the development of the Albedo Combat Patrol game on a Lead Adventures thread, and at Salute 2019 I had decided to limit myself to buying one of the APCs.

That went as well as could be expected.

So I walked away from the Sally 4th stand with a Skirmish Starter set, and the aforementioned APC (of which more later).

The set comprises four Extraplanetary Defense Force (EDF) Heavy infantry (with various head and tail components) and seven Independent Lapine Republic (ILF) light infantry with (of course) rabbit heads. All multi-part miniatures.

The majority of the arms and weapons are cast in one piece with locating pegs and matching holes in the bodies. The material is quite soft, some of the barrels required straightening. There are some mould lines, but they were generally easy to remove with a needle file.

The EDF are armed with three battle rifles and a one sub-machine gun.
The ILF have five machine carbines, one machine carbine with a grenade launcher and a light machine gun.

Standard 25mm slotted bases are also supplied, plus the password for PDFs of the rules.

I decided that I would base mine on 32mm lipped bases (which is standard for my Superheros and not Star Wars).

I assembled one rabbit and one cat figure. The one piece arms and weapon worked okay, you have to slightly widen the inter arm gap to get them in place then squeeze it shut. This can be a bit of a problem with fast setting superglue. It might be worth only putting glue one side, then putting the arms in place and glueing the other side in-situ (which will depend on your superglue being fluid enough). For the heads, I pilot drilled a hole in the dimple in the body then opened it out to 3mm with my standard neck drill. The neck piece then fitted snuggly into the body.

The first ILF figure.

The uniform was Vallejo German Field Grey, dry brushed with Citadel Nurgling Green Dry then lightly dry brushed with Citadel Terminatus Stone. That was then washed with Citadel Athonian Camoshade. Boots, weapons and webbing were Citadel Abaddon Black with a light dry brush with the Citadel Terminatus Stone.

The hands and head were Army Painter Oak Brown, inside of the ears Citadel Bugman Glow, dry brushed with Citadel Terminatus Stone.

Scale shot with William Killian.

We Demand A... Shrubbery!

Woodland Scenics do a range of plastic tree armatures for different scales. What will function as a tall tree in one scale will work as a shrub or bush in a larger scale.

The armatures come in two parts. A rather flat tree armature and a stump/base. As I am going to be gluing them to Renedra plastic bases, in a number of cases I have removed the peg from the bottom of the armature, drilled and pinned with some 1.5mm plastic rod.

As you can see, the armature is rather flat. It is easiest to clean the mould lines (of which there are many) while it is flat. I warmed the plastic with boiling water (you can also use a hairdryer) and the application of brute force via a pair of pliers.

I rotated each branch such that the whole thing made a near circle. The base of the trunk and the Renedra base was drilled and pinned with 1.5mm plastic rod, and glued with copious quantities of liquid poly. Once dry, the trunk was painted with Citadel Agrellian Mud technical paint (it cracks to simulate bark).

The base was sprinkled with Woodland Scenics Fine Cinder Ballast and some granite ballast for additional texture.

The whole thing was sprayed with Citadel Chaos Black.

The trunks were painted with various brown and grey shades from a wet palette, dry brushed with Citadel Terminatus Stone and then washed with Citadel Agrax Earthshade. The bases were painted with Vallejo Burnt Umber.

The foliage on the trees is Woodland Scenics Green Poly Fibre, cut into clumps and glued using PVA applied to the branches.

The bases were decorated with a mixture of Peco Patchy Grass Tufts, Gamers Grass tufts, various shades and lengths of static grass and fine turf (minced sponge).

Some of the "trees" were shortened by cutting the trunk with a razor saw just below the first branches. This was to give them a more shrub or bush like appearance rather than being short trees.

Some haircutting is required to trim the more "fly away" bits of poly fibre.

There is the question, do I add "leaves" to the bushes, either using fine turf or some cut out leaf material?