West Wind Productions Gas Lamps

I bought a couple of packs of these gas lamps for West Wind Productions at a Wargames show last year.

I think they will really add to the flavour of my table when we start to play In Her Majesty's Name next week. However, they have been sitting in their blister packs since I got them so I really needed to get them ready.

I don't think the paint job will be to arduous, I am planning on simply painting them black with the glass parts either being skyblue or yellow, depending whether I decide to go with a daylight look or a night-time one...

I opened up the blisters last week and cleaned up 5 of the lamps. They don't need much work, just a brief scraping with the edge of a craft knife to remove the moulding lines. 

I then glued them to their square bases. These are about a centimetre square, and add some weight to the lamps. At this point it became obvious that the centre of gravity of these lamps is quite high and with the small base any nudge of the table is likely to have them falling all over the place.

I could have simply glued them to a larger piece of card, but that seemed like an in-elegant solution. Finally I decided to laser cut some new bases for them. I designed a round, paved island, that will pass as a traffic island or something similar. These can be dotted around the board and shouldn't look out of place on any Victorian or later city street. I removed the square metal bases and inserted the lug on the bottom of the lamps into the MDF traffic island. 

I am very pleased with them , I think they look nice and neat, will fit in with the scenery and are a lot more stable than before.