Carronade 2016

This post is a little late as I have been very busy, however, I am starting to get the urge to kick some life back into the blog and a Carronade photo dump seems as good a place as any to start.

We had a really enjoyable visit to the show in Falkirk this year. As usual Jeff and myself spent the morning on a table in the Bring and Buy hall. Jeff  moved a few things and was happy enough, but I managed to shift most of the stuff that I took and easily funded my trip, covered my purchases and actually came home with a tidy profit.

Once that was out of the way we got some lunch and then spent the rest of the day perusing the main halls. The standard of the tables was as high as ever, with most displaying a very good level of terrain and miniature painting.

Anyway, on with the photo dump, comments included where I have something relevant to say...

It was interesting to see this printed cardboard scenery in person. It does offer those not interested in building their own terrain an easy way to put together a very attractive table. Personally, I will  not be buying it, but it is impressive.

This game looked fun and my sons were keen to play it, however, we ended up playing a different game, so hopefully we will see this one at one of the other shows later in the year.

Nice to see AvP The Hunt Begins making an appearance. I have just about finished painting my figures for the game, so hopefully we shall get a few games in in the near future.

Craig Cartmell of The Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare, co-author of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Daisho was demoing his latest game, Blood Eagle so we managed to get a game run by the author himself. My sons took on the part of a band of marauding Vikings trying to get through a village while a group of Viking women and old men attempted to delay them until reinforcements can arrive. I took on the role of the women and old men. If the marauders managed to get a man on to their ship for a whole turn I would lose, if they couldn't get there in six turns I would win.

The fight came down to the last dice roll, with their leader boarding the ship and one of mine trying to stop him blowing his horn. If I had landed a blow I would have won, but as it was that was not to be and my boys snatched victory from me in the very last moments.

Craig very graciously signed my copy of Blood Eagle (which I took along for that very purpose) and I also picked up a copy of Daisho, for when I eventually get around to painting some samurai minis...

I didn't spend too much money at the show, sticking pretty closely to my planned purchases, I got a few figures from Crooked Dice, a couple of Footsore Miniatures Saxons to add to my Gripping Beast plastics and a copy of the Warband rules from Pendraken, which I intend to use with my 15mm Copplestone barbarians...

A very good show, and to be honest it will be hard to beat it at any of the other Scottish shows. I haven't been to Claymore since it moved venues several years ago, so maybe this year I will make the effort to get down there!

3D Printing Wargames Scenery with PrintableScenery.com

I have been very busy recently and haven't had much time to build any new scratch-built Frostgrave terrain. However, I did back printablescenery.com with their Winterdale Kickstarter campaign to produce a range of wargaming scenery that people can 3D print themselves.

With the campaign I have got enough files to produce just about anything that a I would need for a fantasy wargames table, including a fully expandable castle, village buildings including a blacksmiths forge and an inn, and plenty of other scatter scenery, such as walls, a bridge, stockades and gnarly trees.

We have had two 3D printers in the workshop for 3 or 4 years now and they have run very well, although the driver software for them is not the most versatile. I am building a new 3D printer, but that will not be finished for a while yet, so I used the workshop machines to do some test builds on the printablescenery.com models.

I thought I would start simple and do some of their dry stone walls but unfortunately our 3D printers (2 x Up Plus One) can be a bit a picky with the files they will run and although the walls looked OK, we couldn't get them to print. I have had a look at the wall sections in the driver for my new printer and they look fine, so it would appear that I am just going to have to wait for those...

Next up I decided that I would again keep things fairly small and use the files for the Bridge Cottage. To keep things even simpler I didn't build the lower stone section and just used it as a simple one storey building.

The first parts that I printed were the two halves of the roof. The files that printablescenery.com supply are laid out in the best orientation to allow 3D printing without printing supports. However, the Up Plus One cannot be set to print without supports, so we have printed them in a different orientation. The roof sections were printed the way they are seen in the photos, as this gave the minimal level of necessary support.

The roof sections went very well and gave a very substantial build.

I must say, I think that the wall thickness on the roof sections is possibly a little excessive. They do want to be strong enough for repeated handling, but these pieces are literally strong enough to stand on!

As you can see from these photos there are a few "stringy bits" on the roof tiles. These were not too bad, and would not take long to clean up with a craft knife. 

 

I spent 10 or 15 minutes cleaning up the two sides of the roof and the painted on a quick coat of solvent (dichloromethane, or liquid plastic cement), which finished off the roof nicely.

Next up was the ground floor walls. Once again, not being able to turn off the support meant that the model was left covered in a layer of support all around, both inside and out. \This did take me a while to clean up, but once removed the build was very nice. The part is designed with a grill in the place of the door, so that it does not need support material (...), I cut this out once printed.

Finally I printed the floor and the front door.

Once the parts had been cleaned up I put the thing together, just to see how it looked, I think you will agree, the it looks pretty good!

Although the 3D printed floor gave a reasonable wooden effect, I decided to laser cut a piece of thin plywood with a wood grain.

As you can see by these two pictures, it doesn't make a lot of difference, but I was happier with the laser cut floor.

The floor that I 3D printed  didn't go to waste. I glued it to the base of the roof section and it worked really well for locating the roof on to the top of the walls below. For future reference, I plan to magnetize the roof so that it sits nicely on top of the walls.

The two parts of the roof fitted really well and only left a small seem. I filled this with knifing putty. This is very similar to modelling putty, but is a lot cheaper.

Once dry and sanded the seem was virtually invisible.

Now, as this was theoretically the first floor, and there should have been a stone section below it, I had to add a door step, which I did with a piece balsa wood. Finally i spent a bit of time over the weekend painting it.

I am extremely pleased with the results and will be moving on to printing some more of the range over the next few months.

I didn't spend too much time painting the internal detail, after all, it will rarely be seen. However it is nice to know that it is there, if I do need to use it!

PrintableScenery.com are running a follow up Indiegogo campaign, to expand the range with some extra pieces, and also give people who missed the Kickstarter a chance to pick it up. Check out the new campaign HERE.

Frostgrave Scenery Project - Magic Circles (Teleport Discs)

This is the shortest post yet and the simplest for me to make.

The scenario in the main rulebook calls for 4 two inch diameter discs to act as teleport points around the table. I had planned to make these up and laser cut them, however, I came across this blog article in which J P Price had already created some really nice artwork to print out.

I took his artwork and set it up for laser cutting and also added a couple of layers steps up to the disc. I engraved the discs both as raster graphics and also did a vector graphics version.

The discs on the left are raster graphics, the laser engraves in the same way that a printer prints an image, going backwards and forwards over the entire area. The right hand discs were converted to vector graphics, in these the laser follows the lines.

I have given them both a blast of undercoat and then dry brushed and washed them to bring out the stone effect.. I may well add some faded paintwork and will also add some snow to finish them off.

Frostgrave Scenery Project - Trees

After a couple of rather long projects I have a couple of quicker ones to show.

First up we have some trees.

I bought a couple of bags of wintery trees from an Ebay dealer in China. The trees are supplied with the snow already on them, but just pieces of wire coming out of the trunk. For the two packs they cost around £16.

To base them I cut and sanded some random shapes out of some scraps of 6mm MDF. The edges are sanded down to the table level with the plan that they will look like snow drifts once complete.

I drilled 2mm holes where the trees were to be placed and glued them in with PVA woodglue.

Once the trees were firmly stuck in place I moved on to finishing the bases. Normally I would add sand at this point, but as they were snow covered I skipped this stage. I simply applied a nice thick coat of white emulsion paint and while the paint was still wet I sprinkled Woodland Scenics Soft Flake Snow over them.

I will give them all a spray coat of matt varnish to hold the foliage and snow in place.

A nice simple little project that took very little time at all...

Frostgrave Scenery Project - The Mausoleum Part 05

Sanded and painted the basic building.

I went for a darker grey than I had first planned, but I think this adds to the somber tone that will suit Frostgrave...

The actual tomb will be left un-fixed, so that the building will be able to be used for other games. It's lack of windows could be a problem but that can be put down to various things (a banks security, a cold house etc.).

Once the paint on the building had set I moved on to the woodwork. The support for the small steps at the back of the building was built from balsa-wood.

Some strip spruce for the steps.

The doors were cut from balsa-wood.

Once in place I painted them a faded brown to give a enough of a feeling of old wood, without looking too rotten.

I am happy with the building as being finished now and just need to add some sand to the base, and possibly a few dead plants. I will do this when I have a few other items to do. So I am calling this job finished.